CHILD MARRIAGE:
THE INDIAN MINOTAUR
AN OBJECT-LESSON FROM THE PAST
TO THE FUTURE
by
ELEANOR F.
RATHBONE
' .
Copyright
LONDON: GEORGE
ALLEN & UNWIN LTD
The newly issued Indian Census
Report for 1931 contains many
disquieting revelations, but none
more so than the huge increase in
child marriage and the continuing
enormous mortality of women due
to premature maternity, bad mid¬
wifery, purdah and kindred social
evils. The first part of this book
exposes the futility of the steps
hitherto taken to cope with child
marriage. The second part discusses
the remedies. Wider voting rights
and a larger share in administration
are claimed for women and women
themselves are urged to take up the
Government’s challenge, £ "Educate
public opinion,” by organising an
extensive campaign of propaganda
and resistance to those who break
the law prohibiting child marriage.
The book has a direct bearing on the
problem of India’s future Consti¬
tution and contains new material
concerning other problems besides
that of child marriage.
2 s \ 6d net
Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2017 with funding from
Wellcome Library
https ://archive.org/details/b2981 91 06
‘
.
CHILD MARRIAGE
THE INDIAN MINOTAUR
CHILD MARRIAGE
THE INDIAN MINOTAUR
AN OBJECT-LESSON FROM
THE PAST TO THE FUTURE
by
ELEANOR F. RATHBONE
J.P., LL.D., M.A.
Member of Parliament for the Combined
English Universities; Member of the
Liverpool City Council
LONDON
GEORGE ALLEN <2? UNWIN LTD
MUSEUM STREET
■?7 5 5 3
FIRST PUBLISHED IN I934
W £ lLGO M C 1 N bT I T U TE
LIBRARY
Coll.
welMOmec
Call
ho.
rJ s
All rights reserved
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY
UNWIN BROTHERS LTD., WOKING
TO
ALL INDIAN WOMEN
WHO HAVE SUFFERED FROM
OR ARE STRUGGLING TO REMEDY
THE EVILS DISCUSSED
IN THIS BOOK
PREFACE
I know well the criticisms to which anyone who has
only paid one brief visit to India exposes herself in
writing on an Indian theme. My answer is that if my
authority is negligible, my authorities are impregnable,
and it is on these I have built my thesis. But this has
entailed a method which itself risks the charge of
having produced a patchwork of quotations rather
than a book.
The plan of the book is this : The first two chapters
summarize the main facts concerning child marriage —
its effects, the efforts made to end it, and their results
— each chapter being followed by selections from my
authorities. The last two chapters set forth what I
believe to be the most hopeful means of remedy, and
for the specific proposals in the last I am solely
responsible, though there again I have been able to
appeal to general principles laid down by those whose
right to speak cannot be challenged. Here and there
I have used material which has already appeared
in memoranda which I have previously written for
private circulation or in newspaper articles.
I must acknowledge the debt I owe not only to these
authorities but to my friend, Elizabeth Macadam, who
has read the script throughout and insisted on modifying
some of its acridities. Some may think that too many
of these still remain. But I defy anyone with a particle
of imagination to read in full the documents from which
I have so freely quoted without rising from the perusal
9
THE INDIAN MINOTAUR
with a mind steeped in gall. If I have tried to discharge
some of this gall in the faces of the public, it is only
after three years’ fruitless trial of more ladylike ways
of endeavouring to arouse a greater general sense of
concern and responsibility for the “great and corroding
evil” — again I quote my authorities — which is eating
out the vitals of the Indian peoples.
As a symbol of the evil, I have chosen the mythical
Minotaur, to whom the Athenians were compelled to
pay yearly tribute of seven youths and seven maidens
till Theseus slew the monster, and my last chapter is
in effect a challenge to the women of India to play
the part of Theseus.
ELEANOR F, RATHBONE
London, January igj4
io
CONTENTS
PAGE
PREFACE 9
INTRODUCTION 13
CHAPTER
I. CHILD MARRIAGE AS EXPOSED BY THE
JO SHI REPORT 17
EXTRACTS FROM THE JO SHI REPORT AND
OTHER SOURCES 27
II. THE SARDA ACT AND ITS EFFECTS, AS
EXPOSED BY THE 1931 CENSUS REPORT 42
NOTES FROM THE CENSUS REPORT OF
1931 60
III. FUTURE REMEDIES: I. THROUGH
WOMEN’S PART IN THE NEW
CONSTITUTION 76
OFFICIAL EXPRESSIONS OF OPINION ON
WOMEN’S FRANCHISE 90
IV. FUTURE REMEDIES: II. THROUGH THE
EDUCATION OF PUBLIC OPINION BY
METHODS OLD AND NEW 94
APPENDIX: NOTES ON SOCIAL CONDI¬
TIONS OTHER THAN CHILD MARRIAGE
AFFECTING WOMEN IN INDIA 12 1
AUTHORITIES QUOTED 135
1 1
CHILD MARRIAGE:
THE INDIAN MINOTAUR
AN OBJECT-LESSON FROM
THE PAST TO THE FUTURE
INTRODUCTION
This study has a double purpose — to promote more
effective action against the gigantic evil of child
marriage and to use its history as a warning of the
frightful risks to which we are exposing Indian women
if we give them in the new constitution of India no
better means of self-protection than they have had in
the past, during the years of our dominion.
It is not the only instance. In the Appendix I give
a summary (chiefly in the shape of extracts from
official publications) of some of the other conditions
under which Indian women suffer — ill-health and an
utter insufficiency of medical, nursing, and midwifery
services; illiteracy and a preposterously small share of
educational opportunities ; unfair marriage laws, which
permit polygamy and the casting aside of a barren
wife to the man, while binding a girl child indissolubly
to a husband whom she has not chosen and from whom
she has no legal means of escape, however ill he treats
her ; the sufferings and austerities of the Hindu widow’s
lot; the imprisonment for life behind the bolts and
bars of social custom which goes by the name of
purdah.
13
THE INDIAN MINOTAUR
These are the conditions which prevail — nothing like
universally of course, but among vast masses of the
170 million “daughters of the Empire” whom we are
now going to hand over to new and largely untried
rulers. Are we proud of these conditions? No doubt
the chief responsibility for cruel customs must rest on
those who practise them. But are there not two kinds
of responsibility — primary responsibility for the evils
we directly cause; accessory responsibility for evils we
struggle too weakly against, when such struggle is
within the sphere of our competence and our duty?
No one will deny that a Government and, under a
democratic constitution, the electorate which has put
it in its place have some share of responsibility for the
death-rate, the morbidity, the hygienic conditions, the
educational opportunities, the civil rights, the marriage
and inheritance laws of the people under its rule, and
that this responsibility is greatest with regard to those
sections of its subjects who are most inarticulate and
least equipped with the constitutional means of self¬
protection.
Are we satisfied that in these respects British adminis¬
trators, either during the generations when they were
in semi-autocratic control, or in recent years when
they have shared that control with Indians, have done
the best, the most that could be expected of men who
boast that they have been “father and mother” to the
“dumb millions” of India’s peasants and have led their
feet into better paths than they have ever trod before?
What, for example, has their paternal protection done
for the millions of unhappy young girls forced into
14
INTRODUCTION
premature maternity in open defiance of the law,
whose wrecked constitutions or prolonged, agonizing,
lonely deaths are described in the words of their own
countrymen in the following pages? No doubt there
have been grave difficulties — difficulties due to super¬
stition, ignorance, apathy, poverty; other difficulties
inseparable from the position of alien rulers pledged to
respect the customs and traditions of a civilization and
of religions not their own. But what has been the
quantity and quality of the efforts put forward to
overcome these obstacles?
With regard to child marriage, the pages which
follow indicate the answer. Or try another test. Go to
any good reference library and take down some score
or so of the innumerable books on India by those who
have served her — ex-Viceroys, ex-Governors, and the
lower ranks — choosing books dealing not with technical
subjects but with the general problems presented by
Indian rule. Look up in the index such words as
“women,55 “marriage,55 “purdah.55 You will find some¬
times nothing, sometimes a few paragraphs or sentences
paying conventional tribute to missionary efforts, or to
the recent uprising of the women’s movement, or
making complacent reference to the British suppression
(several generations ago) of suttee and infanticide.
That is not the way men write of a subject that has
ever occupied many anxious hours in an official day
or been wrestled with in the wakeful hours of the
night which they keep for their knottiest problems, or
has set their hearts aflame and left scars on their
consciences.
15
THE INDIAN MINOTAUR
It is easy to be unjust. There have been administrators
who have spoken out, taken strong official action,
initiated or supported legislative action, perhaps at
some risk. And for one whose acts have reached the
public ear there may have been scores in isolated posts
all over India who have extended protection to women
in every way open to them. But the policy of rulers
can be judged only by its broad tendencies and its
achieved results. There can be no doubt that the
general tendency of the all-male British administration,
and the advice openly tendered to its new recruits, has
been to “keep off the woman question,” as delicate
ground likely to cause trouble and bring odium on
the Government.1 And the advice has been so faithfully
obeyed that not only the hands but the minds of these
officials have been kept off the women. The very thought
of the women, if it ever intruded, has been dropped
into that dark oubliette which every one of us keeps
in his mind for that most detested of intruders — a
persistently neglected responsibility.
Let those who distrust these generalizations have the
patience to read the following record concerning the
most devastating and generally recognized of the evils
which beset Indian women, and of the efforts made to
end it. Then let him ask himself if he is proud of the
record, and whether he would be happy to see his
nation transfer its responsibility to others, before it has
at least placed in the hands of those whom we have
so signally failed to free the means of freeing themselves.
1 See, for example, the speech quoted on p. 57.
16
CHAPTER I
CHILD MARRIAGE AS EXPOSED BY THE
JO SHI REPORT
The grave evil of child marriage and premature
maternity and the right of the State to take cognizance
of it and intervene have been recognized by Indian
administrators for nearly a century. Hindu and Muslim
ancient law severely punished the offence of rape
outside marriage, but the idea of making intercourse
between husband and wife below a certain age illegal
seems to have originated with the Law Commissioners
who drafted the Indian Penal Code in 1846. The
Code, finally enacted in i860, prescribed a punish¬
ment which might extend to transportation for life
for the husband who consummated his marriage
when the wife was under ten years old. 1
Over thirty years later, in 1891, public attention
having been aroused by a number of cases in Bengal
to the intense suffering, often death, caused by pre¬
mature cohabitation and immature prostitution, the
“age of consent,” as it was thereafter called— -meaning
consent to sexual intercourse — was raised for both
married and unmarried girls to twelve. There was
agitation against this Act, but the Government took
' a firm stand. Sir Andrew Scoble, who introduced it,
asserted “the right and duty of the State to interfere
1 Report of the Age of Consent Committee ,
the Joshi Report ), p. 10.
17
ig2g (hereafter called
B
THE INDIAN MINOTAUR
for the protection of any class of its subjects, where a
proved necessity existed,” and to those who appealed
to Queen Victoria’s pledge “to pay due regard to the
ancient rights, usages, and customs of India,” the
Viceroy, Lord Lansdowne, himself replied by saying
that the Queen’s Proclamation had always been under¬
stood by every reasonable man and woman and
interpreted by the Government as subject to the
reservation that
“in all cases where demands preferred in the name
of religion would lead to practices inconsistent with
individual safety and the public peace, and con¬
demned by every system of law and morality in the
world, it is religion, and not morality which must
give way.”
Unfortunately, these bold words do not seem to
have been followed by any systematic attempt to
enforce the Act, or even to make its existence and
the reasons for it widely known and understood
by the people. Thirty-seven years later, the Committee
appointed by Government to investigate the matter
found that the very existence of a law prohibiting
consummation of marriage before a certain age
was
“practically unknown throughout the country. A
knowledge of it is confined to judges, lawyers, and
a few educated men, who may read newspapers
or are in touch with the courts of law. ... It is
possible that a knowledge of the law and the con-
18
CHILD MARRIAGE
sequences of a breach thereof might have ensured
a greater respect for it in many instances.”1
This failure was probably due partly to alarm at
the agitation which the law aroused in some Provinces,
partly to lack of sufficient interest on the part of
all-male administrators trained to avoid “the woman
question” as delicate and troublesome, partly to the
intrinsic unworkability of the Act. These difficulties in
the way of enforcing it as summarized by the same
investigating Committee were: the necessarily private
character of the offence; the difficulty of ascertaining
the age of the girl owing to the illiteracy of witnesses
and the imperfect registration of births ; the inadequacy
of medical tests ; and, above all, the reluctance of both
wives and their parents to complain. “The Indian
girl-wife, . . . impressed since childhood with ideas
about her devotion to her husband . . . would rather
undergo any suffering than testify against him in a
court of law, especially as social opinion may not
uphold her. The parents . . . are interested in avoiding
. . . the exposure of a delicate family affair in a law
court.” Also, they reflect that if they secure a convic¬
tion, “the husband may discard her and take another
wife. Among Hindus generally there is no custom of
divorce and girls cannot remarry even if discarded.”2
These difficulties indeed appear overwhelming. But
^ they scarcely explain the action of the Government in
first backing an Act so clearly dependent for enforce¬
ment on energetic administration and an awakened
1 jfoshi Report , p. 18. 2 Ibid., p. 19.
J9
THE INDIAN MINOTAUR
public opinion, and then taking so little trouble to
stimulate that administration and to educate that
opinion. In these respects, as we shall see, history has
repeated itself. Do Governments ever learn from their
mistakes ?
After the 1891 Act, public opinion seems to have
gone to sleep for another thirty years. But the war
directed men’s minds once more to the physique of the
nation and the causes that were undermining it. From
the time of the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms onwards,
Indian social reformers have led the way in pressing
the subject on the Assembly. At first their objective
was to further raise the age of consent to fourteen. An
unofficial Bill to secure that end was introduced in
1922 and circulated to Provincial Governments, who
gave varying opinions — three favourable, two hesitant,
and three unfavourable. Two years later a further
attempt was made by Sir Hari Singh Gour. This time
the Bill was referred to a Select Committee, which
reduced the proposed age for married girls from
fourteen to thirteen. The Assembly refused to accept
the reduction, and raised the age outside marriage to
sixteen. The Government strongly opposed this, and
the Bill was defeated. Next year, to meet the rising
tide of opinion, the Government itself introduced and
carried through a Bill fixing the age of consent at
thirteen inside and fourteen outside marriage.
An attempt to raise the age further was made in
1927 by Sir Hari Singh Gour. But meantime a strong
opinion had grown up in favour of the more drastic
but more effective and easily enforced step of pro-
20
CHILD MARRIAGE
hibiting even the celebration of child marriage, and a
Bill to this effect was introduced by Rai Sahib Harbilas
Sarda. Hence the Government decided to refer the
whole matter to a strong Committee, and this they did
in June 1928.
This marks an epoch in the history of the subject.
The Committee was all-Indian, except for one British
woman doctor. It is known as the Joshi Committee,
after the chairman, Sir Moropant Joshi, formerly
Home Member of the Central Provinces. The other
nine members included two judges and four other
lawyers. Six members were Hindu and three Muslim.
It was thus, as the Government had promised, a very
weighty Committee, and it did its work — which
covered just a year — with great thoroughness, travelling
all over India, interviewing four hundred witnesses,
and issuing nearly eight thousand questionnaires. Its
report, exposing as it does some of the sorest places in
Indian private life, is a remarkably courageous and
convincing document, and it remains the chief store¬
house of information on its subject. Here is the final
pronouncement of this weighty Committee after its
exhaustive examination on the extent and results of
child marriage: —
“Early maternity is an evil and an evil of great
magnitude. It contributes very largely to maternal
and infantile mortality, in many cases wrecks the
physical system of the girl and generally leads to
degeneracy in the physique of the race. Let us com¬
pare the case of Sati which was prevented by legis-
21
THE INDIAN MINOTAUR
lation with the case of early maternity. Satis were few
and far between. They compelled attention by the
enormity of the evil in individual cases, by the
intense agony of the burning widow and the terrible
shock they gave to humane feelings. But, after all,
they were cases only of individual suffering; the
agony ended with the martyr and the incident had
some compensation in the martyr being almost
deified as an ideal Hindu Tativrata,5 a devoted wife,
the subject of adoration after death. In the case of
early maternity, however, the evil is widespread and
affects such a large number of women, both among
Hindus and Muslims, as to necessitate redress. It is
so extensive as to affect the whole framework of
society. After going through the ordeal, if a woman
survives to the age of thirty, she is in many cases an
old woman, almost a shadow of her former self. Her
life is a long lingering misery and she is a sacrifice
at the altar of custom. The evil is so insidious in all
the manifold aspects of social life that people have
ceased to think of its shocking effects on the whole
social fabric. ... If legislation was justified for
preventing Sati, there is ample justification for legis¬
lation to prevent early maternity, both on the grounds
of humanity and in furtherance of social justice. 551
In the above passage we seem to see this Committee
1 Joshi Report , p. 102. Readers imperfectly acquainted with the
nature of Sati (suttee) will better understand the force of the
condemnation of early maternity implied in this comparison if
they read Edward Thompson’s book on Suttee (Allen & Unwin,
1928).
22
CHILD MARRIAGE
of Indian judges, lawyers, and politicians struggling to
find words strong enough to express the horror with
which their detailed study of the facts has filled them.
Those facts are recorded in nine closely printed
volumes of evidence and summed up in a substantial
report.1 But one of its members has testified that
c ‘things are far worse than they are described in the
Report, because we did not wish to excite or provoke
unnecessarily the feelings of orthodox people,”2 while
another described the evidence as “a relentless story
of cruelty and selfishness.”3
One by one the Committee deals with and dispels
every comfortable fiction that had been put forward to
extenuate the evils of early marriage. As to the extent
of the practice, after careful examination of the Census
Report they reach the conclusion that over 42 per cent
of the girls of India are married before fifteen.4 Nor is
the custom confined, as is commonly supposed, mainly
to Hindus. The extent to which it is found to prevail
among Muslims is said to have surprised even their
representatives on the Committee, which calculates the
percentage of girls likely to marry under fifteen in
the two communities as 48-4 for Hindus and 37*01
for Muslims. We shall see later that according to the
Census of 1931 Muslims have actually surpassed Hindus
in the proportion of their child-wives. Dealing with the
favourite argument of Indian apologists that early
marriage in India is the equivalent of betrothal in
1 Report of the Age of Consent Committee , Calcutta, 1929.
2 Legislative Assembly Debate , September 11, 1929, pp. 667-68.
3 Ibid., p. 385. 4 Joshi Report, p. 95.
23
THE INDIAN MINOTAUR
Western countries, the Committee points out that
marriage among Hindus is “not a mere betrothal or
engagement, from which the parties can break off, but
an irrevocable tie which makes the couple husband
and wife in the eyes of the law and of the public and
after which the death of the boy leaves the girl a
widow.”1 It is true that very early marriages are not
usually followed by immediate consummation, but
“consummation soon after marriage is almost universal
among classes which practise early marriage. . . . The
fitness of a girl for consummation and possible mother¬
hood from a physiological point of view is hardly taken
into consideration.”2 As to pre-puberty consummation,
the Committee found that, although not usual in any
class or community, the practice “exists to a far greater
extent than may be ordinarily supposed and requires
a drastic remedy.”3 With regard to the widespread
belief that puberty is attained very much earlier in
India than in the West, the evidence before the Com¬
mittee pointed to an average difference of only a year.
And, finally, the Report demolishes the hope that the
practice is rapidly disappearing. It says : “There is no
doubt that the practice of early marriage is being
gradually abandoned by several castes and com¬
munities. But the pace of improvement is exceedingly
slow. Moreover, progress in one community is counter¬
balanced by retrogression elsewhere, and while castes
and classes which are considered advanced may be
getting over the practice, others are adopting the older
1 Joshi Report , p. 92.
2 Ibid., p. 97. Ibid., p. 97.
24
CHILD MARRIAGE
customs to an increasing extent, with a view, possibly,
to ascend in the scale of the caste hierarchy.”1
But it cannot have been merely the figures as to
wide extent of child marriage, nor even the regret¬
table fact that it had diminished scarcely at all,2 that
so greatly perturbed this Committee of experienced
Indians. Rather, doubtless, it was the steady impact of
evidence — from doctors and hospital matrons, lawyers
and sccial workers, fathers and husbands confessing
their own experiences, in every province and com¬
munity in India — that brought home to them the
frightful results of the practice. The effect of such
evidence is cumulative, and no summary is likely to
induce in its readers the feelings which so overwhelmed
those who heard the living witnesses. That is a mis»=
fortune common to all inquiries into great evils. Many
a line of statistics has curled up in it more tragedy than
all the tragedies of Shakespeare ; but how many who
read it have the imagination
to see
The absent with the glance of phantasy.
I conclude this chapter therefore with a number of
typical passages, chiefly from the Joshi Report but a few
from other authoritative sources, illustrating the nature
of the sufferings arising from child marriage and finally
describing the conditions under which these sufferings
are endured when, as happens in a great majority of
1 Joshi Report , p. 96.
2 Was destined, in fact, as we shall see later by the Census of
I93I, to increase enormously, though for an exceptional and
non-recurrent reason.
25
THE INDIAN MINOTAUR
cases, no medical or any other kind of skilled aid is
available. Such evidence could be multipled many
times. As the Census Commissioner remarks of the
Joshi Report , “It is quite impossible to read it, in
particular the medical evidence, with any approach to
equanimity.551 Nevertheless, I beg the reader to make
the effort, bringing to it the eyes of the mind as well
as of the body, and remembering that these things have
not happened in a dead past but are happening every
day, all over India, in enormous and for the present
increasing numbers. Sir John Megaw2 estimates that
“ioo out of every 1,000 girl-wives are doomed to die
in child-birth before they have ceased to have babies,
and about 200,000 mothers die in giving birth to
children every year in India.55 Such deaths are nothing
less than deaths on the rack, due to the straining of
muscles and sinews, nerves and tendons, in the body’s
effort to perform a function for which it is too weak,
immature, or ill-formed. They are never “natural55 save
in the sense that they are Nature’s vicarious punish¬
ment for disobedience — not the victim’s — to her laws.
Yet because they happen out of sight, they are easily
forgotten and have called forth what slender measure
of preventive and remedial effort the reader of the
succeeding chapters will be able to judge.
N.B. — Readers who desire a short cut are recommended to
skip to p. 42.
1 Census of India , 1931, Vol. I, Part I, p. 96.
a Now Medical Adviser at the India Office; quoted in Census
of India , Vol. I, Part I, p. 97.
26
EXTRACTS FROM THE JOSHI REPORT AND
OTHER SOURCES
The examples chosen are chiefly from medical and
legal witnesses whose positions are likely to carry
confidence. It is only fair to say that there were some
witnesses of similar calibre who had had very little
experience of the extreme evils caused by early
maternity, showing that in some circles or districts
these tragic occurrences are comparatively rare.
Sir P. C. Ray, University College of Science and
Technology, Calcutta. — Vol. VI, p. 2251.
Asked if he had known of cases where girls of thirteen
or fourteen had become mothers and suffered for it,
he replied : —
“It is common knowledge. It is not so rare that I
should single out one or two cases. I have noticed it
almost in horror and shame that girls should become
mothers at so early an age.”
He says that, when a man dies, leaving a young
widow, she becomes “the common property of the
entire village caste.” Also that “in the Hindu society”
a man of sixty who is a grandfather may marry a girl
of twelve or fourteen, and that this is “not rare; I will
not say it is very uncommon.” “Public opinion tolerates
many dirty things.”
1 The references, except where otherwise stated, are in the
volumes of evidence issued with the Joshi Report.
27
THE INDIAN MINOTAUR
Dr. G. J. Campbell, M.D., Principal of the Lady
Hardinge Medical College, New Delhi. — Vol. I,
p. 443.
“I must have attended more than a thousand Hindu
girls for child-birth at ages of twelve and three-quarters
to sixteen and a half, and the bad effects seen in them
and in others under observation or treatment as a
result of this early child-bearing can hardly be
exaggerated.”
She gave as instances of the bad results, tuberculosis,
“which often develops during pregnancy or lactation” ;
osteomalacia (softening of the bones), of which she
knew of twenty-seven caesarian operations in the
previous year for this cause alone; the girls look five
or ten years older after the birth of the first child;
children are small and below par in vigour and
resistance to disease.
Dr. N. H. Blair, L.S.A.(Lond.), of Darjeeling (Vol. VI,
p. 287),
says that the cases of serious injury to mothers are so
numerous that it is difficult to make a selection, but
he gives the following instances : —
{a) A girl of twelve and a half who suffered in labour
for seven days.
( b ) A girl who died in labour at the age of eleven
years ten months.
(c) A girl aged twelve and a half who had to have
her baby decapitated, and nearly died.
“Many girls under thirteen suffer from osteomalacia
as a result of early maternity.”
28
THE “JOSH I REPORT”
Dr. E. A. Douglas, in charge of the Kinnaird Memorial
Hospital, Lucknow. — Vol. IX, p. 53.
“I saw a girl of twelve whose vulva and vagina were
so badly mutilated and mental condition so badly
affected that she was quite demented. Her sister
forcibly removed her from the husband’s home. On
admission to hospital, her vulva tissues were crawling
with maggots and she herself was affected with gonor¬
rhoea. Incidentally, the husband sued for restitution
of conjugal rights and won his case, I was told.”
Had many cases of osteomalacia, which is general
in mothers of eighteen to twenty after the second
pregnancy; also cases of eclampsia. “Mothers under
fifteen are far more difficult to cure than elderly
women.”
Dr. Dube, Health Officer of Lucknow.— Vol. IX, p. 93.
Asked to account for the fact that the deaths of girls
from ten to fifteen are nearly double those of boys of
same age, he attributed it to purdah and early marriage.
He said that the conditions in houses were “simply
abominable,” and in such houses the girls are confined
after the eighth or ninth year and not allowed to go
out. He attributed their deaths to the lack of education
on ventilation and unhealthy surroundings.
Dr. Sathna, Health Officer of Delhi. — Vol. I, p. 439.
“The first child among Hindus almost always dies.”
He attributes this to early marriage and premature
births.
29
THE INDIAN MINOTAUR
“Girls have not got the vitality to fight against
nature.”
Dr. Edith Ghosh, Calcutta. — Vol. VI, p. 38.
Has a private practice and has been in charge of a
maternity hospital.
Saw a girl having her eighth pregnancy ; she was
only twenty-two.
In the year before that she saw a Madrasi girl; she
was only twenty-one, but it was her seventh child.
“I told her she was not trying to get better. She said,
‘It is no use my living because maternity comes on
every year.’ She did not want to live. She died a few
months later of inanition.”
She thought the physical injury of very young
maternity “as nothing compared with the mental
shock.” Had seen one or two girls become mental
wrecks.
Remembered one girl of thirteen married to a man
of seventy-five; he had had two or three wives, but
they had died shortly after marriage. He was a very
rich man, and very well known in Calcutta.
Sister Subbalakshmi, Head Mistress, Lady Willing-
don Training College. — Vol. IV, p. 117.
“Would you say that in the case of Brahman girls
the marriage is consummated before the girl completes
her fifteenth year?”
“It is so in 99 per cent of the cases . . . the number
is larger under fourteen than under fifteen.”
30
THE
cc
JOSHI REPORT
99
Asked for cases where young girls had suffered from
early consummation, she said : —
“Within the last five years I have come across more
than ten cases like that among Brahmans. . . . They
are married at ten or eleven till the time they go to
their mother-in-law’s house. There is no girlhood at
all among Brahmans. The mother-in-law treats the
girl as if she were a woman ; the domestic duties are
on her shoulders. This results in the derangement of
the womb and there are other complications.” She
instanced a girl married at ten and a half; marriage
consummated at eleven; has to do the whole of the
domestic work from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m. ; had to go to
hospital four times; husband resisted her going and
would not let her stay long enough to get cured.
“You see any number of mothers between fourteen
and fifteen who are not able to look after their children ;
so young themselves, they cannot keep awake at night
with the babies crying all the time.”
“How many such cases have you seen?”
“Many such cases; it seems to be a general rule.”
“More than ten or twelve in two years?”
“More than that.”
Dr. A. G. Scott, Chief Medical Officer of the Women’s
Medical Service. — Vol. I, p. 25.
Had “several cases” when in charge of a hospital at
Delhi where the bridegroom was in all cases over
thirty ; the bride’s age was usually about twelve. One
case was that of a child of ten years ; the mental con-
31
THE INDIAN MINOTAUR
dition of the child was one of terror almost amounting
to insanity. The physical injuries were in some cases
severe. No case was brought to hospital in which there
had not been fairly severe haemorrhage, it being that
which had frightened the mother-in-law into bring¬
ing her.
Mrs. Lilian Starr, Medical Mission, Peshawar. —
Yol. I, p. 207.
“In Kashmir . . . many girls aged eleven or twelve
are brought in labour to our hospital. They are often
in extremis and quite unable to bear living children
without the skilled operation of caesarian section.
Undoubtedly many do not reach us and die in
labour.55
The Hon. Mr. Justice Nanavutty, Judge of the Chief
Court of Oudh at Lucknow. — Vol. IX, p. 243.
“I certainly do consider early consummation of
marriage and early maternity two of the principal
factors responsible for the high maternal and infantile
death-rate. . . . The purdah system results in the
ignorance of the girl-wife in matters of health and
hygiene, and the custom of the dai or barber-woman
cutting the umbilical cord of the child with a dirty
unclean kharpi (generally used for cutting grass) or
an old razor are other causes that make for the early
death of the mother and child with the silence and
depth of a strong tide at night. . . . Until the women
of the country take up this cause in right earnest, the
generality of men, who look upon them as their
32
THE
JOSHI REPORT
)5
Si
playthings, will not really and seriously bestir them¬
selves.”
Evidence of Orthodox Muslim Witnesses
“Quazi Zahirul Haq, of Dacca, admits that girls are
married at all ages, even at two and three, among the
lower class of Muslims, that immediately after puberty,
which happens at eleven or twelve, the girl is sent to
the husband’s house and that he is aware of girls who
became mothers at thirteen or fourteen, but he will
oppose all consent and marriage legislation as it
interferes with the liberty gi anted by God’s law. To
the same effect is the evidence of Khan Bahadur
K. A. Siddiqui, who strongly urges the reduction of
the present age of consent to eleven. The witness states
that cohabitation is not uncommon in lower classes
before puberty and is considered essential by all,
including the advanced section, soon after puberty. He
is personally aware of four or five girls who had
cohabitation at ten and eleven and became mothers.
He is, however, deadly against fixing by law an age
of marriage.”1
The Report from the United Provinces says:—
“Some of the Kunbis who were examined at Benares
stated that in their caste girls were at times sent to
their husbands before puberty, that many girls had
become very weak and their children were very weak
and unfit to do any sort of agricultural work, that they
1 Joshi Report , p. 68, Bengal.
33
G
THE INDIAN MINOTAUR
had tried their best that no marriage should take place
before ten years of age for boys and seven for girls,
but nobody would agree to it and that without penal
legislation fixing a minimum age of marriage no reform
would be achieved. . . . One of them, in fact, said
that he had a daughter who was 'now5 five years old,
and that he was unable to get a husband for her
because she was considered by his caste people to be
too much grown up.5 51
But perhaps the most vivid account of the effect of
the system on the life of young girls is contained in a
speech by Dr. Muthulakshmi Reddi before the Madras
Legislative Council (of which she was Deputy Presi¬
dent) on March 27, 1928, when introducing a motion
recommending the Government of India to raise the
age of marriage. The following are some extracts : —
“I beg to move this resolution on behalf of the woman
population of this country because, Sir, owing to the
prevalence of the early marriage system among the
higher-class Hindus the advent of a girl baby is never
welcome ; the birth of a girl is looked upon as a great
piece of misfortune, especially if the parents are poor ;
the responsibility of finding a decent, suitable husband
for her is already felt so keenly as to kill even the
paternal and the maternal love, with the sad result
that in many poor families girl children are neglected
from the moment of their birth.
“In a few instances I have seen the girl babies
allowed to die out of sheer neglect by their own parents.
1 Joshi Report , p. 85.
34
THE “jOSHI REPORT”
. . . Even the poor mother may be blamed for having
given birth to a girl. The medical woman on attendance
will not be remunerated properly. People in their
sorrow will forget even the usual practice of distributing
sugar and pans to their friends and relations. The whole
house will put on a gloomy appearance.
“Thus, owing to this evil custom of child marriage,
the girl child, even from the moment of her birth,
becomes a concern and a burden on her family. As
she approaches her eighth or ninth year her parents
begin to talk of her marriage, her future husband, and
the probable expenses. So care and anxiety take hold
of the family.
“Naturally the girl shares in the feelings of her
parents. We know of many instances when sensitive
girls burnt themselves to death with kerosene oil to
save the parents the expense and annoyance of their
marriage. Even such tragedies have failed to move the
country into action.
“The girl loses all her childlike innocence, becomes
shy, reticent, imitates all the ways and manners of the
elderly women of the family. The women of the house,
having no other outside recreation or distraction,
indulge in such talks as to infuse into the minds of
these girls the sex ideas of a mature brain. After the
marriage, the girl becomes the property of the bride¬
groom’s parents and undue restrictions are placed upon
her movements. She should not run about or play or
talk loudly or laugh in the presence of her mother-in-
law or strangers. Thus she is robbed of the brightest
period of her life, her girlhood and youth. She knows
35
THE INDIAN MINOTAUR
only childhood and womanhood. Thus from the period
of infancy itself she is forced into the period of pro¬
ducing infants! . . .
“During the sixteen years of medical practice among
the higher-class Hindus, I have attended on many a
child-mother ranging from twelve to fifteen, not without
many fears and misgivings as to the ultimate results of
those unnatural labours. I have sat by their bedside
nights and days with a heavy heart, vainly moaning
over their miserable condition, a condition brought
about, not of her own free will and choice, not by her
own imprudence or misdeed, but by a blind meaningless
custom of our society and the ignorant superstition of
the parents. . . .
“Again, I cannot describe to you, Sir, without a pang
in my heart, the miserable lot of our young Indian
mothers, who themselves not keeping well owing to
repeated conceptions, abortions, and miscarriages,
have to look after half a dozen constantly ailing, fretful,
sick children in the house.
“In the middle-class and poor families with an
unsympathetic husband and an illiterate, cruel-hearted
mother-in-law, the lot of the poor young, inexperienced
daughter-in-law is very hard indeed. She has to serve
as a cook, as a nurse to her children, as the wife and
a general servant in the house, and in addition has to
observe all the foolish acharams prescribed by the elders
of the house. . . .
“Dr. Macphail, for whom we all entertain a high
regard, a lady who has spent fifty years in the service
of Indian womanhood, tells the same tale : —
36
THE “jOSHI REPORT53
“ ‘During forty years of medical work I have
attended a good many labour cases. . . .
“ ‘I have attended six young girls who were about
twelve years old, certainly not yet thirteen, and I
have attended many who were in their fourteenth
or fifteenth year. Almost invariably these labours
were abnormally long and difficult, and the inevit¬
able suffering was greatly increased by terror. In one
case the young mother went insane during labour
from terror and pain, and it was many months before
she recovered from the nervous shock and strain and
was able to take her place in the family. When they
do survive this ordeal, the salvation of these young
mothers lies in the fact that the babies are usually
very small. But it is a very sad outlook for the
country if the children of the highest caste are so
feeble, puny, and undeveloped, as many of these
children prove to be. Many of these young mothers,
we all know, are permanently injured and never
really recover. . . .’ 55
Conditions of Confinement in Indian Homes
The above accounts of the sufferings of these child-
wives, even when attended by expert women doctors,
are terrible enough. But to realize the full horror of
the facts, one has to remember that the vast majority
of confinements in India are attended, not by doctors,
but by native midwives or dais. The methods employed
by these are described as follows in a treatise on
Child Welfare , by H. Suhrawardy, M.D., F.R.C.S.I.,
L.M., District Medical Officer, Lillooah, E.I.R., Fellow
37
THE INDIAN MINOTAUR
of and Examiner for Calcutta University and the State
Medical Faculty of Bengal, Fellow of the Medical
Society of London : —
“In a great many homes in India, specially among
the Indians of the higher castes, the puerperal woman
is looked upon as unclean, whose touch necessitates a
bath of purification, and therefore the worst and the
oldest beds and such beddings as could be thrown away
after the event are used, and the most useless lumber-
room of the house is chosen as the lying-in apartment.
Sepsis, puerperal fever, infantile tetanus, and other
microbic diseases take their heavy toll from such
suitable nidus and material for their development.
After child-birth the poor mother is denied God’s light
and fresh air, and even cold water. The windows and
doors, such as there may be in that small room, are
kept shut and securely fastened ; and although ventila¬
tion is totally obstructed, and there are no fireplaces
and chimneys in Indian houses, yet a fire in an ‘Angethi’
is constantly kept going inside, and a small chirag or
taper is kept lighted day and night to ward off the
evil spirits. Instead of a clean accoucheur or a midwife,
a dirty low-class woman, with long and filthy nails
and fingers cramped with dirty rings made of base
metals, recruited from the untouchable caste of the
Chamar or the Dosad, is requisitioned to usher into
life the helpless infant who is the hope and the future
of the country.
“I have been through the slums of the East End of
London and of Edinburgh, and have practised mid-
38
THE
JOSHI REPORT
55
ec
wifery there, and I have worked in the tenement houses
of the back streets of £Dirty Dublin,’ but nowhere have
I come across anything so repugnant, so appalling, and
so cruel !
4 ‘The dirt and the squalor of the slums of the West
is due to want and poverty, but what excuse have we,
the well-to-do Bhadraloge Indians, for subjecting our
high-caste Hindu and Mahommedan women to this
awful torture, born of and nursed by rank superstition
and ignorance?
“In the vitiated and unhealthy surroundings which
I have attempted to describe, the poor woman who
has undergone the travails of child-birth is incarcerated
and is given hot fomentations to her body and made
to drink decoctions of various ‘heating’ vegetables and
dried fruits from three weeks to forty days. During this
period the infant is never brought out of the Soori or
Antoor, as this room of horrors is called, for fear of
the evil eye, the Dain or village witch, and the evil
spirits. It has always been a wonder how, under such
conditions, mothers have ever escaped cent per cent
mortality, and why our very manhood has not been
exterminated or dwarfed to the lowest possible ebb by
the blight of these harrowing surroundings. I am,
however, glad to say that under the influence of
Western medical science things have materially im¬
proved and altered in many houses, but whether due
to habit or superstition or poverty or ignorance, the
conservative ideas regarding the management of
puerperal women have not seen their last in
India.”
39
THE INDIAN MINOTAUR
Dr. Arthur Lankesters very similar picture ( Tuber¬
culosis in India , 1920) adds the fact that the girl’s own
mother is too often shut out from her during her
ordeal
“Perhaps the hardest of all the consequences of this
idea is the fact that it banishes the girl’s own mother
at the very time when, if ever in a lifetime, a mother’s
help is needed. While in some parts it is permissible
for the mother to enter the room on condition of her
undergoing special ceremonial cleansing afterv/ards,
special sets of clothing being sometimes reserved for the
occasion, yet in the vast majority of cases the presence
of the mother is forbidden. This would matter less if
the midwife was one in whom confidence might safely
be placed. But this is far indeed from being the case.
Dirty in habits, careless in work, and often callous to
suffering, bold in treatment, with courage born of crass
ignorance, and which causes untold mischief to her
patients, the Indian da’i is in urgent need of reform.
Its very nature as things are now limits it to women
of the lowest class, while the fact that it is hereditary,
one individual regarding it as her right to have the
care of a limited group of families, removes the incentive
of competition and rivalry. I have traced the course of
a single woman of this sort for years amongst the
respectable Hindus of a large city, her operations being
continually followed by a trail of puerperal fever and
death. She and those like her would make frequent
internal examinations, never using water to cleanse her
hands until the end of the case.”
40
THE “ JOSHI REPORT”
Numerous activities are now in operation, under both
Indian and British auspices, to train the indigenous
dai. But, as the League of Nations Report on Health
Organization in India (1928) remarks: —
“The work, however, proceeds very slowly, and
there are many obstacles to be overcome. All doctors
who have had experience of the work are convinced
that it is not sufficient merely to train the dais. Super¬
vision of their work subsequently is necessary to prevent
their lapsing into the old methods. . . . Yet that super¬
vision is for the most part non-existent , and cannot be supplied
without greater funds and personnel .”
And again : —
“The supplying of trained dais or midwives to the
villages is an exceedingly difficult problem, the solution
of which has scarcely been attempted
41
CHAPTER II
THE SARDA ACT AND ITS EFFECTS AS
EXPOSED BY THE 1931 CENSUS REPORT
The two main recommendations of the Joshi Com¬
mittee were, briefly: first, that the age of consent
should be raised to fifteen for married girls and to
eighteen for unmarried ; secondly, that more effectively
to prevent premature consummation, even the celebra¬
tion of marriage of a girl under fourteen should be
prohibited and penalized, but not made invalid.
Little has been heard of the first recommendation,
concerning age of consent, but the proposal con¬
cerning age of marriage was speedily carried into law.
This was the easier because the Bill introduced by
Mr. Sarda in 1927 had already been circulated to the
Provincial Governments and had also passed through
a Select Committee, which had dropped the Bill’s
original proposal to invalidate marriages before the
legal age and had substituted the infliction of legal
penalties on those responsible for such marriages, on
lines very similar to those recommended by the Joshi
Report . This Bill, extended to cover all communities
and not only Hindus, was accordingly again brought
forward in the Legislative Assembly, and after several
days’ hot debate and some amendment it passed
by 67 votes to 14 and became law on October 1,
1929. It received the support of the entire official
bloc and of every European who voted. The Home
42
THE SARDA ACT
Member, Sir James Crerar, declaring that “the measure
has the most cordial sympathy and the strongest
support of Government,” pointed out that “public
opinion has had very ample opportunity of expressing
itself 55 ; paid a warm tribute to the Report of the Joshi
Committee ; and proclaimed the Government as
convinced by it that “there exists a grave and corroding
evil in the country which is clamorous for a remedy.5’1
In face of this declaration it cannot be denied that
the Government of India shares with Indian social
reformers full responsibility for the Act.
It is also undeniable that the Act has not only been
an almost complete failure, but that indirectly it has
been the occasion of a colossal increase in the evil it
sought to remedy. As there is a danger that this fact
may be used (by those ignorant of or willing to ignore
the truth) as an argument against future attempts at
social legislation, it is important that not only the facts
about this failure but also the reasons for it should be
fully understood.
Let me first summarize the facts : —
The provisions of the Act were briefly as follows :
Passed on October i, 1929, it was not to come into
effect until six months later, i.e. on April 1, 1930.
After that, it was to apply to all British India, not (as
in the original Sarda Bill) to Hindus only. It prohibits
the marriage of girls under fourteen and of boys
under eighteen. It expressly prohibits any Court from
taking proceedings against offenders except upon
complaint. A complainant who wishes to lay informa-
1 Legislative Assembly Debates, September 4, 1929.
43
THE INDIAN MINOTAUR
tion that the Act has been infringed must do so before
a Presidency Court or a District Magistrate’s Court,
and he must, unless specially exempted by the Court
for reasons assigned in writing, give security for his
ability to pay if required ioo rupees compensation if
the prosecution fails. If it succeeds, the Court may
inflict a penalty of not more than 1,000 rupees or
one month’s imprisonment, or both, on any of the
following: the husband (if over twenty-one), the male
parent or guardian of the child spouse, the person who
conducts or directs the ceremony. A husband aged
eighteen to twenty-one and any woman defendant may
be fined but not imprisoned.
The positive fruits of the Act are easily counted.
As the Secretary of State was good enough to ascertain
for me in reply to a Parliamentary question, during
two years and five months after the date when it
became enforceable, that is, up to the end of August
1932, there were 473 prosecutions, of which only 167
were successful. There were 207 acquittals, and 98
cases were still pending. Of the successful prosecutions
in only 17 did imprisonment form the whole or part
of the sentence. The largest numbers of cases were
in the Punjab and the United Provinces, with 146
and no respectively. In Bengal, where the Joshi
Committee had found the evil in its worst form to be
specially rampant, there were only 41.
This is a meagre harvest. But the immediate effects
— not of the Act itself, but of action taken and of
action not taken in connection with it — are staggering.
As already mentioned, six months were arranged to
44
THE SARDA ACT
elapse between the date of enactment and that on
which the measure was to come into force. The interval
was presumably intended to allow time for the people
to become acquainted with and reconciled to the law.
I have not been able to discover that any special
educational propaganda was anywhere set on foot
to achieve the latter purpose. But the work of publicity
was effectively seen to, not by the friends but by the
enemies of the Act. Believing (wrongly as the event
proved) that the Government at last meant business
about child marriage, and foreseeing much pecuniary
loss to themselves, the priests who had been wont to
draw rich fees from marriage ceremonies, and the
money-lenders who provided the parents with the
wherewithal, resolved that at least they would make
hay while the sun shone. The methods they adopted
have been variously described. In one province it is
said that while the Government did nothing but
distribute a few leaflets, obscurely worded and in
English, the emissaries of the opposition had managed
to circulate to the remotest villages the tidings, often
announced by word of mouth to the beating of drums,
that after April ist the Government had prohibited
all marriages — not of girls under fourteen, but for
fourteen years ; or, alternatively (according to another
version), that marriages would be inauspicious during
that period. Whatever the means, testimony is unani¬
mous as to the result. All over India there was a
veritable spate of marriages, of children of all ages,
from infancy upwards, so that the night in many
districts was made hideous with the sounds of the
45
THE INDIAN MINOTAUR
processions and festivities. But it is only since the
Report of the 1931 Census became available in the
summer of 1933 that the extent of the havoc could be
calculated. This has now shown that though the total
population has been increased by only 10 -6 per cent,
the number of acknowledged wives under fifteen has
increased from roughly 8J to 12 J million, and the
number of husbands under fifteen from under 3J to
over 5! million, while wives under five years old have
nearly quadrupled (from about 218,500 to about
802,000). As to child widows, the Report showed that
a remarkable decrease since 1921 (from roughly
396,000 to 321,000) was likely to become a great
increase, as a result of the fatal six months. This had
already become true of the infant widows under five,
whose numbers had increased from roughly 15,000 to
31,000. As the Census Report observes: —
“the year that elapsed between the rush of an¬
ticipatory marriages and the taking of the Census
left time for many infants married in haste to become
widows for life,” and this is “probably significant
of sorrows to come” (p. 221).
But this is not all. The Census Commissioner con¬
siders, on evidence too technical to explain here, that
from a million to a million and a quarter married
girls under fourteen years of age have been returned
as unmarried, as well as a considerable number of
boys, the reason being the parents’ fear of incurring
prosecution for an illegal marriage. This is given as
the explanation of the anomaly that had already struck
46
THE SARDA ACT
students of the Census figures first published, that in
spite of the practice of polygamy and the absence of
polyandry in India, these figures showed over a million
more husbands than wives. 1
From the figures it appears that, even if we allowed
for an increase in the number of child marriages
proportionate to the increase in the population (and,
fortunately, the Census Report gives reason to believe
that there was, up till 1930, a decrease of about 1 per
cent in each decade), the number of children hustled
into matrimony during the fatal six months was
probably not less than three million girls and two
million boys.
A significant and ominous fact also made plain by
the Census Report is that this frightful increase in
child marriage has been proportionately greatest
among Muslims, and that their community has led
the outcry against the Act, although it is not even
pretended that the Muhammadan religion requires or
encourages premature marriage. One frequently,
indeed, hears it asserted that it is a practice peculiarly
Hindu. In fact, even at the 1921 Census the ratio of
Muslim wives under fifteen was only 4 per cent lower
than among Hindus, and has now become slightly
higher, the increase being greatest, at least in some
provinces, among wives under ten years old. Also
there is evidence that the practice has spread to
primitive tribes previously free from it.
Deplorable as are these results, they at least show
that the existence of the Act, unlike the earlier attempts
1 Census of India, 1931, Vol. I, Part I, pp. 215-16.
47
THE INDIAN MINOTAUR
to regulate age of consent, had somehow (chiefly
through its opponents) reached the consciousness of
the masses and that they expected it to be enforced.
As the Census Report of Assam candidly remarks,
“they need not have concerned themselves, because
the Act is in practice a dead letter,5’ and “practically
a dead letter” is repeated in the Reports of most of
the other provinces. The necessity for enforcing “respect
for law and order” has recently been much in the
minds and on the lips of those in authority all over
India. But laws concerning social reforms are ap¬
parently an exception, being intended rather to quiet
the consciences of the legislators and their critics at
home and abroad than to be obeyed. The official
attitude was indicated after the first recorded prosecu¬
tion under the Act. The offender, who had given his
ten-year-old daughter in marriage in defiance of the
warning of his village Headman, was sentenced to
one month’s imprisonment — the maximum term per¬
mitted under the Act. Instantly the Punjab Govern¬
ment telegraphed to order the man’s release. Probably
they were made nervous by the unrest prevailing at
the time in the northern provinces, to which mis¬
leading rumours concerning the Sarda Act were said
to have seriously contributed. Anyway, their action
was widely reported in the Indian Press. But before
that (as we learn from the Census Report) an assembly
of 12,000 Muslims had met in the Jama Masjid,
the great Mosque of Delhi — centre of the Govern¬
ment — to witness the marriage of a boy of thirteen
to a girl of nine, just four days after such marriages
48
THE SARDA ACT
had become illegal. The District Magistrate was
petitioned to prosecute all concerned, but no prosecu¬
tion appears to have followed.1 In Madras, a munsiff
who transgressed the Act was dismissed by the Col¬
lector, but reinstated with a warning by higher
authority.2 The Courts seem to have followed the
hints thus given them by usually imposing extremely
light penalties. In Bengal, two Muslim brothers,
aged fifty and forty-five, were convicted of marrying
their wards, aged four and two respectively, in order
to obtain final control of their property. They were
fined 150 rupees (about £11) each — not an excessive
penalty, as the Census Commissioner dryly remarks,
in view of the fact that they had presumably attained
their end.3 (It will be remembered that the maximum
penalty is 1,000 rupees or a month’s imprisonment.)
In a few towns social agencies did take action.
Thus in Gujerat the Social Reform Association inter¬
fered successfully in several cases, including two where
men of forty or fifty were about to marry girls of six.
In Bombay the Youth League interfered to prevent
the marriage of a sickly boy of twelve who already had
one living wife.4 Unfortunately, the marriage was
subsequently carried out outside British territory,
after which the boy died, leaving two child widows.5
In Nasik the Court interfered on the complaint of an
indignant neighbour to prevent the marriage of a
Brahman girl of ten to a deformed cripple nearly four
times her age. But individuals valiant enough to take
1 Census of India , 1931, Vol. I, Part I, p. 232. 2 Ibid., p. 233.
3 Ibid., p. 233. 4 Ibid., p. 232. 6 Ibid., p. 231.
49
D
THE INDIAN MINOTAUR
similar action are rare, and, as the Joshi Committee
had specially warned the Government, the number of
organized agencies able to take action
“is so small and the places where they exist so few
that it would be a travesty of facts to suggest that
these associations would serve the purpose of
reporting even grave cases of breaches of the law.
The rural areas may be altogether wiped off the
map if hope is concentrated on the manner in which
these associations will function.”1
Indeed, we can see now that it does not need the
studied indifference of the authorities to the Act
once it was on the Statute Book to secure its failure.
It was foredoomed to fail by the very nature of its
provisions. What did they amount to? The onus of
taking action against child marriage, the “great and
corroding evil . . . clamorous for a remedy,” as the
Government’s own spokesman had described it, is
placed exclusively on the private citizen. And what
sort of motive is left him to proceed? Certainly not
self-interest; certainly not pity for the child victim.
Since he must make his complaint formally and
publicly, whether he succeeds or fails he incurs the
enmity of both families and their friends. If he fails,
he may lose his ioo rupees. If he succeeds, he does
not rescue the child bride, but merely exposes her to
the risk that the husband or his family may wreak
their spite on her. She is just as indissolubly bound to
1 Joshi Report , p. 133.
50
THE SARDA ACT
him and under his authority as if the marriage had
not infringed the Act.
Some critics have severely blamed the promoters
of the Bill for consenting to drop the original proposal
to invalidate child marriage. But since a Hindu
marriage is by their religion indissoluble, the proposal
would have involved so serious a conflict between law
and religion and such possibilities of endless dispute
concerning legitimacy of offspring and inheritance of
estates that it is well known that the Government
would have refused its assent. The Joshi Committee
itself had rejected the proposal as impracticable.
Short of this, however, there were three provisions
which would have immensely strengthened the effective¬
ness of the Bill. First, the Court itself might have been
permitted (as it is in the case of some crimes) to
initiate prosecution upon information privately re¬
ceived, after such inquiry as it thought necessary
to establish a prima facie case. Secondly, the com¬
plainant might have been permitted to apply for
and the Court to issue an injunction prohibiting a
marriage shown to have been arranged. It appears
in fact that in a few places a District Judge has actually
issued such an injunction, though there is no provision
for this in the Act, and the practicability of such
procedure does not seem to be generally known.
Thirdly, the Court could have been enabled to require
the husband, or his guardian if he was a minor, to
make provision for the separate custody and main¬
tenance of a child-wife married in defiance of the
Sarda Act until she reached the legal age for marriage,
5i
THE INDIAN MINOTAUR
or until such period as it thought it safe for her to
return to him. The Joshi Committee recommended
such a provision.
But it is not only in this respect that the recommenda¬
tions of the Joshi Committee have been ignored. That
Report also advised as essential to success a number of
steps which could hardly have been incorporated in
the Sarda Act, but were rather matters for administra¬
tive or separate legislative action. The more important
of these were the following : —
(a) Wide publicity for the provisions of the
Marriage and Consent Laws and educational
propaganda. Women’s Associations to be utilized
for such propaganda and aided with money grants
for the purpose. The Committee uses capital letters
for this recommendation: “we attach great
IMPORTANCE TO A PUBLICITY CAMPAIGN AND . . .
WE FEEL THAT THE STATE OUGHT TO UNDERTAKE THE
LARGER PART OF SUCH A CAMPAIGN.”
(b) An accurate marriage register in the pre¬
scribed form to be kept through an administrative
department of the Government, containing details
of age, etc. ; and to facilitate this, compulsory
notification of marriages to a prescribed Local
Authority by the parties or their guardians, per¬
sonally or through authorized agents.
(c) Universal compulsory notification of births,
including the child’s name, sex, etc.
(d) Birth certificates and marriage certificates to
be issued free of cost to the parties concerned.
52
THE SARDA ACT
(e) The employment of women police, women
jurors and assessors, and medical women, in the
investigation of sexual offences. Where women
police are not available, the use of respectable women
of the locality to escort girls and be present during
investigations. The provision of separate women’s
waiting-rooms at all court houses, etc.
The common sense of these recommendations is
obvious. They are all based on the evidence before the
Committee of the reasons for the futility of previous
attempts to regulate age of consent. How can offences
against the law be proved unless the age of the victims
is known? (This, however, only applies to border-line
cases. In a large proportion the girls are so piteously
young that no doubt can arise.) How overcome the
sensitiveness of shy secluded Indians girls and their
mothers, except by using women in the delicate
inquiries? Most important of all, how remedy the
ignorance of the law, which the Committee found to
be known only to “a few educated persons,” unless
by taking ample steps to ensure publicity for its
provisions? Yet, so far as I have been able to ascertain,
not one of these recommendations has been carried
into effect, or even attempted to be carried into effect,
either by the Central Government or by any of the
Provincial Governments. Thirteen Parliamentary ques¬
tions, beginning just before the Act was due to take
effect and spread over three and a half years, brought
me always the information that the Indian Governments
were considering the matter, and finally, on Decem-
53
THE INDIAN MINOTAUR
ber 18, 1933 (Hansard, p. 896), that they would “take
such action as may appear to them practicable, but
for various reasons most of the specific proposals are
in present conditions not practicable.” As to education,
“there is a concensus of opinion that educative
propaganda regarding the evils of child marriage is
desirable, but a general agreement that such pro¬
paganda is best left to non-official agencies” — agencies,
that is, which over a large part of the surface of India
simply do not exist. So that after this lengthy interval
these Governments have at last decided that they can
do nothing, in effect nothing, either to enforce or
to persuade the people voluntarily to comply with an
Act to which they promised their “strongest support.”
One thing only they appear to have done — resisted
attempts to rescind or further emasculate the Act.
Several Bills designed to achieve this object, as, for
example, by allowing exemption to anyone who
could show conscientious motives or family reasons
for ignoring it, have been introduced. But these appear
to have made no progress, presumably from lack of
official support.
In the spring of 1932 I spent two months in India,
visiting the capitals of all the provinces except Assam,
chiefly to gather information concerning the franchise
question. But I took the opportunity of discussing the
Sarda Act with many people — members of Govern¬
ments and legislative bodies, officials, leading social
workers. It would be unfair to stress the negative
result of inquiries made without notice and in the
course of conversations devoted to other issues. But
54
THE SARDA ACT
I certainly found no trace anywhere of that anxious
inquiry and consultation as to how the Sarda Act
could be made effective, whether by improvements
in administration and legal machinery or by educational
propaganda and publicity, which I had imagined
must inevitably have followed the scorching exposures
of the Joshi Report. Yet an impartial observer, Mr.
Edward Thompson, who cannot be accused of hostility
to the present administration, says
“Nothing of recent years has more enhanced the
Government’s prestige than the Sarda Act raising
the marriage age. Government would not lose in
any single respect even if it enforced the Act.”1
This concludes, up till November 1933, the sorry
tale of legislative efforts to end the hideous evil of
child marriage — efforts well intentioned, but backed
by what quality and quantity of thought and study,
imagination and sympathy, courage and determina¬
tion, those who have followed the recital must judge
for themselves.
It may be said that the chief onus of blame must
rest on Indians themselves; that, after all, it is their
countrywomen, their wives, daughters, and sisters
who are suffering these cruel things; that it was the
opposition of their orthodox leaders and communities
that intimidated the Government into its attitude of
caution and passivity ; that it was for the Indian social
reformers who demanded and agitated for the Act to
1 A Letter from India, by Edward Thompson. Faber and
Faber, 1932.
55
THE INDIAN MINOTAUR
see that it did not pass in an unworkable form, and
that it was for Indian social organizations to do the
work of education and enforcement ; and that — except
to so small an extent as makes no matter — this duty
has remained unperformed. It may be said also in
extenuation of the fiasco that in other countries
collective responsibility for social conditions has only
begun to be fully recognized since the Great War, and
that in India the post-war period has been one of
transition and of great difficulty for rulers and ruled
alike. The working, or obstructing, of the Montagu-
Chelmsford Reforms, the endless consultations con¬
cerning further constitutional advance, the combating
or the practice of civil disobedience, these are the
problems that have absorbed the most active minds
and the most influential personalities on either side.
Little has been left for social reform but the dis¬
tracted and momentary attention of preoccupied and
jaded minds.
Just a century before the Sarda Act, in 1829, Lord
William Bentinck, as Governor-General, put an end
to suttee by issuing a decree for its immediate sup¬
pression. This, as is well known, was successful, not
completely, for such cases continued to occur in steadily
decreasing numbers and occur occasionally even to
this day, but to such an extent that one learned Judge
was able to declare that “the regulation of 1829 seems
to have had immediate effect, and the practice was
almost completely stamped out.”1 But it is less well
known that Lord William Bentinck’s action was taken
1 Edward Thompson’s Sutter, p. 118. (George Allen & Unwin.)
56
THE SARDA ACT
in defiance of nearly all official advisers. Even Ram-
mohan Roy, the chief Indian protagonist of abolition,
thought the step premature. And only three years
before the decree the previous Governor-General,
Lord Amherst, spoke as follows : —
“But, after all, I must frankly confess, though at
the risk of being considered insensible to the enormity
of the evil, that I am inclined to recommend our
trusting to the progress now making in the diffusion
of knowledge amongst the natives for the gradual
suppression of this detestable superstition. I cannot
believe it possible that the burning or burying alive
of widows will long survive the advancement which
every year brings with it in useful and rational
learning.”1
There is a remarkable similarity between the
attitude of Lord Amherst and that of recent Indian
Governments in matters of social reform. Compare the
speech of the late Sir Alexander Muddiman, speaking
on the SardaBill in the Legislative Assembly in 1925
“Coming as I do from a province where the
enactment of the Age of Consent Act in the year
1891 lead to an agitation of an exceedingly serious
character against the Government, I am greatly
impressed by the need for caution. ... I am not
one of those who desire to take the position that
the Government should not do anything in social
reform. But it is a matter on which we must have
1 Quoted by Edward Thompson, Suttee , p. 70.
57
THE INDIAN MINOTAUR
a clear lead from the people themselves. I would
rather — perhaps I am old-fashioned — I would rather
be charged with going too slowly in this matter
than take risks which necessarily follow legislation
in advance of general social opinion in the country.
About the evil which the Honourable Member who
introduced this Bill has attacked, there can be no
possible doubt. He is moving against what I con¬
sider to be one of the most detrimental influences
on the future development of the country. Let me
warn him, however, that he will not take the people
with him if he goes too far or too fast. If he does not
take the people with him, moreover, I know well
that the odium of the enactment will fall not on
him but on the Executive Government, and that
must be a reason why we should observe a consider¬
able amount of caution in the matter.”
Risks, odium ! Have the Government of India ever
hesitated to incur these things when they thought the
object worth it? And when did any object better
justify the incurring of them than the saving of in¬
numerable young girls from agonizing deaths and the
cutting out of a cancer that is undermining the vitality
of a whole people? But let it be granted that risks
should not be taken in the spirit that first promises
“the strongest support” of Government to an Act and
then, when it is on the Statute Book, succumbs to
the opposition of ignorant, misguided people without
a struggle and so completely that it will not even
encourage its own officials to enforce the Act or even
58
THE SARDA ACT
to explain and defend its provisions. In the present
century there have been many reincarnations of the
spirit of Lord Amherst, but no second Lord William
Bentinck seems ever to have revisited India !
Will it be any different in the future? I should
feel more confidence in the answer if the attitude of
those who exercise the greatest influence in the matter
seemed less complacently self-satisfied, less willing to
shift blame for the past and responsibility for the future
on to other shoulders, more willing to join — as well
they might — in a general confession that in the matter
of child marriage we have all “left undone those things
which we ought to have done, and done those things
which we ought not to have done.55
But much will depend on considerations which are
set forth in the following chapter.
N.B. — Readers who want short cuts may here skip to page 76.
But if they do so they will miss some interesting new material
bearing on the general problems of India’s population as well as
on child marriage.
59
NOTES FROM THE CENSUS REPORT OF 1931
It is a pity that the unwieldy form and high price
of the Census reports make them inaccessible to all
but a few. Or, perhaps, from the official point of
view, it is not a pity. For though the bulky volumes
make fascinating reading for those of us who like
studying facts in the raw and in the mass, instead of
samples selected and dressed up to suit the narrator’s
purpose, they do not make cheerful reading. One
cannot imagine returned Viceroys, I.C.S. men, India
Office men, taking down the volumes from the shelf
in the Sabbath of their days when they rest from their
labours, and saying proudly to themselves: “And that
is the India that I helped to make. And God saw that
it was good.” Hence the Government is perhaps wise
in issuing its esoteric writings in as unattractive an
outward form as possible, so that few but the initiated
will be tempted to read.
Here are a few notes, selected but not dressed up,
bearing specially on my subject : —
INCREASE IN NUMBERS OF CHILD WIVES AND
WIDOWS (ALL INDIA)
192
1
l93'
Wives
Widows
Wives
Widows
O— I
9,066
759
44,082
L5I5
i-5
209,397
14,380
757,770
29,365
5-10
2,016,687
102,293
4,200,534
105,482
10-15
6,330,207
2 79, 1 24
7,269,208
185,339
Total under 1 5
8,565.357
396,556
12,271,594
321,701
Total population
318,942,480
352,837,778
60
THE CENSUS REPORT
In certain provinces the increase in child marriage
among Muslims is startling, while for all India the
proportion of wives under fifteen in their community
now exceeds that of any other. Thus the Census
Report for Assam says : “The Muslims have now far
the largest proportion of child-wives in all the early
age-groups.” That for Bihar and Orissa says: “Taking
the province as a whole, whereas the proportion of
Hindu girl-wives (including widows) below the age of
ten has increased since 1921 from 105 to 160, among
Muslims it has increased from 76 to 202.” The same
Report shows a similar increase in the custom in
primitive tribes; i.e. married or widowed girls under
ten have increased from 13 to 57 and boy husbands
under ten from 9 to 37 per thousand.
This is only one indication that it is not only among
Muslims and not only with respect to infant marriage
that this cautious utterance of one Census Superin¬
tendent holds good : “It is also probable that through
close association with their Hindu neighbours they”
(that is, Muslims) “are gradually assimilating more and
more the social customs of the major community”
(Vol. I, Part I, p. 230). If Muslims have acquired
child marriage from their Hindu neighbours, they
have communicated to them and other communities
the sister evil of purdah. And the same tendency to
acquire the bad rather than the good in social customs
may be seen in the abandonment by a large propor¬
tion of Muslims in the Punjab of the just laws con¬
cerning women’s rights of inheritance laid down by
the Prophet, in favour of the Hindu customary law,
61
THE INDIAN MINOTAUR
which excludes women from nearly everything but
the bare right of maintenance.
THE AFTERMATH OF THE SARDA ACT
“The number of married males under fifteen has
risen by 51 per cent and the number of married
females by 26 per cent since 1921, an increase which
is undoubtedly due to the enormous number of
infant marriages which took place in the six months’
interval between the passing of the Sarda Act and
its coming into operation” (Vol. I, Part I, p. 215).
Discussing the curious fact that whereas at all
previous Census takings the number of wives shown
had exceeded the number of husbands (as might be
expected in a country where polygamy is practised,
though not to a large extent), at this Census, 601,244
more husbands were declared than wives — the Report
shows reason for believing that the unnatural excess
must be ascribed chiefly to Hindus, Jains, and Muslims,
and continues : —
“It is not difficult to divine the cause. In all these
communities early marriage is practised, and the
Sarda Act came into force a year before the Census.
Although that Act has in practice been virtually
a dead letter, it is certain that a considerable number
of persons who have married off their children in
contravention of the Act will have hesitated to state
specifically that a child aged so and so (and age
may be asked by the enumerator before civil
62
THE CENSUS REPORT
condition) is married, knowing that such a state¬
ment will lay him open to a possibility of prosecu¬
tion. Moreover, in at least one case a Brahman
association had bound its members not to divulge
marriages made in contravention of the new law.
The fact that the number of concealments has been
so much greater in the case of females than of males
as to reverse the proportions of the married is the
natural consequence of the fact that the bride is
normally younger than the bridegroom, and the
impulse to conceal the age is therefore more frequent59
(p. 216).
The Census Commissioner for Madras remarks : —
“The six months5 interval between the passing of
the Act and its coming into force was criticized by
many of my correspondents. In the words of a
Brahman, it ‘did havoc.5 More than one Brahman
correspondent has urged that the Act should be
taken over, strengthened, and enforced by Govern¬
ment. There seems to be fairly general agreement
that as a rather half-and-half effort it is not entitled
to much respect55 ( Madras Report , p. 34). The Report
continues to point out that the Act seems to have
had some effect, that is “as an excuse for later
marriage, a reason for beating down dowry claims
and undoubtedly in directing a great amount of
attention to marriage questions among communities
and persons who had previously given them very
little thought.55
63
THE INDIAN MINOTAUR
The Report from the Central Provinces says like¬
wise that among the masses the Sarda Act is “prac¬
tically a dead letter.5’ That from Bihar and Orissa
points to the reason : “the majority of mofussil people
are still quite in the dark about the provisions of the
Sarda Act. . . . Even in towns, where people are
aware of the Act, child marriage takes place without
fear of prosecution under the very nose of the police
and the executive.55 The same Report quotes the
ingenuous description given by an orthodox Muslim
correspondent who says : “The provisions of the
Sarda Act are rendered ineffectual when one thinks
of a united village harmoniously performing the
marriage of an under-age couple without any impedi¬
ment or hindrance. Even if there be opposition in a
village, the idea of the security deposit of ioo rupees
is another troublesome factor.55 And again: “As the
prosecution under the Act depends on a complaint
before the magistrate and a security deposit for the
purpose, such prosecution is not feared except in the
case of rivalry, private enmity, etc. When antagonism
and feud exists, the Act gives an additional weapon
to the litigants, and thus it has been a menace to the
peace and security of the people instead of a remedy
for the evil of child marriage to any considerable
extent.”
THE INCREASING SHORTAGE OF WOMEN
One of the most significant and ominous facts re¬
vealed by the Census is that the proportion of females
64
THE CENSUS REPORT
to males has steadily decreased since 1901 and the
reasons assigned for the shortage. The date should be
noted by those who attribute every sign of deterioration
in India to the political changes of the last fifteen
years. The total shortage of females has now reached
nearly eleven million.
“Various reasons have frequently been repeated
to explain this shortage of females which is so
characteristic of the population of India as com¬
pared to that of most European countries. The
female infant is definitely better equipped by
nature for survival than the male, but in India the
advantage she has at birth is probably neutralized
in infancy by comparative neglect and in adolescence
by the strain of bearing children too early and too
often” (Vol. I, Part I, p. 195). And again: “The
practices which govern the female ratio in India,
apart from possible climatic or racial factors, the
nature, degree, and very existence of which are
doubtful, are those relating to the care of female
children and to too early and too frequent maternity”
(p. 203).
Two other factors are mentioned as probable minor
contributory causes. One is faulty enumeration which
specially affects females, partly owing to the greater
difficulty experienced by the enumerator in satisfying
himself as to the existence of the female members
of the family, partly from a feeling that a girl baby is
scarcely worth mentioning to him. (It has been said
elsewhere that in Rajputana the father of a new-born
65
E
THE INDIAN MINOTAUR
daughter announces to his expectant assembled friends
that “nothing” has been born to him. The friends then
“go away grave and quiet.”1) The Report concludes,
however, that “there is no reason to believe that the
short enumeration of women due to this cause accounts
for more than a very small part of the excess of males
disclosed by the Census.” The other contributory
cause indicated is the caste system. Dr. Hutton, the
Census Commissioner, evidently shares the view of
some biologists that inbreeding favours masculinity in
the sex ratio. But though these two causes may have
contributed to the shortage, they cannot explain the
increasing disproportion. Rather they might be expected
to pull the other way, since census methods have
undoubtedly improved since 1901, and caste is generally
believed to be less rigidly observed.
Hence the indication of the figures is that the con¬
ditions which take toll of female lives are and have
been, at least since 1901, increasing rather than
decreasing in their evil potency. This again should
be specially noted by those light-hearted optimists
who, relying on their observation of what is happening
in cities and among the Indian intelligentsia, would
have us believe that child marriage, the reign of the
untrained dai, and purdah are all rapidly giving way
before the forces of progress.
In other respects also the revelation of the Census
runs counter to widely prevalent conceptions. Those
who believe that all the woes of Indian women are
attributable to Hinduism, or again that they may
1 Pandita Ramabai’s High-Caste Hindu Woman.
66
THE CENSUS REPORT
all be set down to economic causes, are faced with the
facts that the ratio of females of all ages per 1,000
males (941 for all India) is “lowest among Sikhs
(782 for India as a whole) ; next lowest among Muslims
(901); and is 951 among Hindus”; and again, that
“within the Hindu community the ratio increases in
inverse proportion to social position and education”
(p. 200) ; reaching among the depressed classes the
comparatively high figure of 982 (Bombay only)
(p. 198). The low female ratio among Muslims is
accounted for (in addition to the other causes) partly
by observance of purdah, especially in the poorer
classes where it entails confinement in narrow and
sunless quarters; partly by the fact that the female
ratio tends, possibly for climatic reasons, among all
communities to be lowest in the north-west where
Muslims preponderate. The lowest ratio of all is found
among Rajputs. The Census Superintendent of
Rajputana concludes that “deliberate infanticide
seldom comes to light, but there is no doubt that
unwanted females are often so neglected, especially
in some clans of Rajputs, that death is the result”
(Vol. I, Part I, p. 196).
Other facts and figures bear witness to the con¬
tinuing and even increasing influence of adverse con¬
ditions on females when they have passed early child¬
hood and reached the reproductive age. The Census
Superintendent for the United Provinces, alluding to
the curve of male and female vital statistics in his
province, says that: “Nothing could demonstrate more
plainly the dangers to which the women of this province
67
THE INDIAN MINOTAUR
are exposed owing to the conditions under which they
bear children. . . . Here we see at once that whereas
the (female) sex-ratio in death has fallen since 1921 at
all other ages, it has risen at the reproductive ages of
I5~30’5 (P- 202). And commenting on vitality statistics
for India generally, the Actuary’s Report annexed to
the general Report says : —
“Taking female mortality as a whole, it can be
stated that the deterioration which set in from 1901
onwards has not yet taken a definite turn towards
improvement. Whereas in the case of males the
position in 1931 with respect to vitality was such
as to bring it back very nearly up to the high level
reached in 1891, the female vitality, however, does
not indicate any recovery of the lost ground”
(Vol. I, Part I, Actuarial Report, Annexed to
Chapter IV, p. 158).
It is notable that the one successful recorded effort
to remedy these conditions concerns one of the States,
Cochin : —
“Further, a steady rise in the age of marriage
consequent on the rapid progress of female education
in the State and the gradual displacement of
primitive methods of midwifery by modern and
scientific methods have considerably reduced the
dangers which almost all women have to face, and
lowered the death-rate among young mothers to an
appreciable extent. The gradual rise in the sex ratio
is but the natural outcome of these improved con¬
ditions” (Vol. I, Part I, p. 202).
68
THE CENSUS REPORT
To Hindus, with their passionate desire for sons,
and, perhaps, if the truth were know, to men every¬
where, an excess of men in any community may seem,
apart from the causes, a consummation devoutly to be
wished. But this view must give way to a further study
of the consequences as set out in this deeply interesting
section of the Report. For premature maternity is
plainly shown, and is, indeed, generally acknowledged,
to be in a large measure responsible for the deplorably
low vitality (illustrated later) of Indians generally,
males as well as females. And it is further shown
that premature maternity, or rather its precursor,
early marriage, results from as well as causes an
excess of males. When there are not enough adult
brides to go round, “it becomes a necessity to secure
a girl while she is still young enough not to have
been snapped up by someone else” (p. 233). The
shortage of suitable brides is further intensified by the
prohibition of widow remarriage among orthodox
Hindus. The Report shows how slowly the custom of
remarriage grows, though it has 1 ng ago been
legalized. Clearly the immense increase in infant wives
which, as we have seen, resulted during the year’s
interval between the spring of 1930 and the taking of
the 1931 Census in more than doubling the number
of widows under five, is bound in the future to result
in a vast increase in the already inordinate proportion
of Hindu women who are widows (167 in every 1,000)
(p. 233). If the prejudice against remarriage persists,
the shortage of brides may indeed become so acute as
to force its own remedy. Here and there a “growing
69
THE INDIAN MINOTAUR
consciousness of the necessity of widow remarriage”
is recorded, as in several petitions presented by dis¬
gruntled bachelors in Gujerat petitioning that re¬
marriage should be made compulsory. One reads also
with grim satisfaction that in Rajputana for 256
potential bridegrooms there exist only 162 potential
brides — a fitting reminder of the inconvenience of
Rajput treatment of girl babies (p. 229).
On the whole, however, the impression left on the
mind by these studies is that, if men ever do learn to
abandon ancient customs by experience of their evil
results, they learn with amazing slowness. Take,
for example, the custom of giving a dowry with a
daughter. One might expect that in a community
where females are in a minority, poJygamv permitted,
and widows debarred from remarriage, the law of
supply and demand would quickly result in it becoming
customary for parents to receive instead of to give
money compensation when parting with a daughter,
as happens, in fact, in nearly all African communities
where the custom of lobola or bride-price prevails in
one form or another. Yet the dowry system continues
to be cited as a burden on parents so heavy that even
in Rajputana, where the shortage of women is greatest,
the expense of it is given as the reason why the Rajput
fathers’ treatment of baby daughters so considerably
exceeds the limits laid down in the maxim :
Thou shalt not kill, but need’st not strive
Officiously to keep alive.
And in Madras, Dr. Muthulakshmi Reddi is able to
70
THE CENSUS REPORT
say to her colleagues in the Legislative Council, as
though it were a matter of common knowledge, that
“we know of many instances where sensitive girls
burnt themselves to death with kerosene oil to save
the parents the expense and annoyance of their
marriage.”1
POPULATION PROBLEMS
The population statistics of the Census Report present
some staggering contrasts and suggest problems which
Dr. Hutton and his colleagues discuss with the frank¬
ness and readiness to admit unpleasant truths which
are so attractive a feature of many Indian official
reports.
On the one hand we are shown a population which
in the last decade has increased by no less than io#6 per
cent — nearly double the percentage increase of the
population of England and Wales in the same period
— so that India, by outstripping China, has again
fulfilled the saying of Herodotus that “Of all the
nations that we know it is India that has the largest
population” (Preface, p. xv).
On the other hand, from one of the tables of the
Report we gather that of 100,000 male babies born
alive in England, Japan, and India, respectively,
there will survive at the end of 50 years, 59,903 English¬
men, 52,629 Japanese, but only 18,658 Indians.
The corresponding numbers of female survivors will
be 64,742 Englishwomen, 51,794 Japanese, and
1 See full quotation on pp. 34-37.
71
THE INDIAN MINOTAUR
19,714 Indians (pp. 169-70). These figures, which
surprisingly indicate slightly greater longevity for
women than for men, are from life-tables some twenty
to thirty years old. But it is concluded that “the
expectation of life has not much altered since 1891,”
being now for all India “at the ages of four and five
respectively, when the expectation is at its best,
36*75 for females and 38*96 for males. Attention is
drawn to the superior expectation enjoyed by males”
(footnote, p. 91).
Here then we see a vast increase in population
despite a deplorably low vitality among the people.
This suggests the alarming dimensions which the
population might reach if the undermining causes
were removed. Are we then to welcome the factors
which make for early death? Dr. Hutton shows, I
think, a justified scepticism regarding the value of
efforts directed simply at keeping babies alive. To
child-lovers it may seem to be — and is — a terrible thing
that nearly half the babies born (at least 45,000 out
of every 100,000) slip into death before they reach the
age of five. It signifies an amount of suffering, physical
and mental, greater than it is possible to grasp. But
the remedy lies in a frank recognition of the fact that
“what is really wanted is fewer babies and better
ones, and it is possible that efforts should be concen¬
trated less on infant welfare directly than on the
reduction of immature maternity, on a general im¬
provement in the standard of living and culture, and
on the removal of the causes generally, rather than on
the treatment of the symptoms” (p. 97).
72
THE CENSUS REPORT
While recalling that “in Europe a rise in the
standard of living is normally followed by a reduction
in the birth-rate,” and that increased intellectual
activity operates in the same way, Dr. Hutton declares
it to be the general opinion of Indian economists — an
opinion which he obviously shares — that the best
hope for an effective check on over-population lies in
the widespread adoption of methods of birth-control.
Difficult as this may be to achieve in a land where
propagation of male offspring is considered by the
majority of the people to be a religious duty, a move¬
ment in that direction is said to have begun and to
be “less hampered by misplaced prudery than in
countries which claim to be more civilized.” A Neo-
Malthusian League has been set up in Madras “with
two Maharajas, three High Court Judges, and four or
five men very prominent in public life as its sponsors.”
In Mysore the Government in 1930 sanctioned the
establishment of birth-control clinics in the four
principal hospitals of the State. Dr. Hutton suggests
that this example might be followed in British India,
and that, “if the luxury of baby-weeks be permitted,
they should at least be accompanied by instruction
in birth-control” (p. 32). One may add that at the
meetings of the All-India Women’s Conference, the
largest body of organized women in India, resolutions
demanding instruction in birth-control through Public
Health Centres have become a regular feature.
One conclusion that can be drawn from all these
notes is that of all the problems that await the new
rulers of India, none more vitally affects the welfare
73
THE INDIAN MINOTAUR
of all India, not merely of its women, than the problem
of how to bring about radical reforms in the conditions
under which its future citizens will be conceived, born,
and reared. To say that the problem cannot be solved
without the co-operation of women is a platitude.
It is probably true to say that it will not, in fact, be
solved unless women are in a position to take the lead
in initiating, pressing upon the legislatures, and
enforcing upon the administration reforms which affect
them — not indeed alone — but far more directly and in
respect of a greater portion of their lives than they
affect men.
It is significant how in India this truth is forced
home upon men who cannot be suspected of feminist
bias, so that we find the Census Superintendent of
Bengal — like the Simon Commission (see p. 90) and
the Public Health Commissioner (see p. 123) — turning
to the women’s movement as the last hope for the
solution of problems otherwise seemingly insoluble and
declaring that a decrease in the birth-rate can only be
brought about by improvements in public health
measures, in the standard of living, and in educa¬
tion, “and perhaps principally by a further eman¬
cipation of women and by their introduction to
spheies of usefulness and activity from which they
are now in Bengal generally debarred” ( Bengal
Report , p. 43).
The question which now faces us is: “Will women
be so admitted, not — as hitherto — in negligible num¬
bers, as a gesture, just to show the world how en¬
lightened are the men of India and their rulers, but in
74
THE CENSUS REPORT
sufficient numbers to make their weight effective?”
Even now the answer is shaping itself in documents
which fly between the offices of Whitehall, Delhi, and
the provincial capitals. Soon it will be decided, and
with it perhaps the fate of how many lives !
75
CHAPTER III
FUTURE REMEDIES:
I. THROUGH WOMEN’S PART IN THE NEW
CONSTITUTION
The component factors of the situation as we now see
it are a weak Sarda Act, “practically a dead letter,”
except for such slight warning influence as it exerts on
a few law-respecting souls ; a Central Government and
Assembly too much absorbed in other matters and
too much intimidated by opposing forces to amend
the Act ; Provincial Governments and Legislatures
unwilling for the same reasons to put into force the
administrative measures that might help to secure its
partial success. Meantime the Indian Minotaur sits
unscathed in his fortress, gorged with his huge meal
of some five million girls and boys delivered over to
him during that fatal October to April of 1929-30, but
still receiving his annual toll.1
What can be done about it? Let us approach the
problem in a spirit of realism, not battering our heads
against stone walls, but seeing how we can walk round,
climb over, or tunnel under them.
I have set out on page 51 the three amendments
to the Act that seem to me, after consultation with
1 Some give it as one reason for the few prosecutions under the
Sarda Act that marriages have been relatively few, every available
infant in orthodox families having already been hustled into matri¬
mony during the six months.
76
FUTURE REMEDIES : THE NEW CONSTITUTION
others of much greater experience, to be really feasible,
without asking the authorities to take risks that they
may reasonably shun. But, again after consultation
with those who have greater knowledge of the political
situation, I feel little hope that any amending Bill will
receive the necessary support of the Government until
the opinion of a wider public than now cares is roused
to demand it. I have suggestions to make as to how
this may be effected. But it may be a slow task, and
meantime there is a measure of immediate urgency on
which, more than on any other, the future fate of
Indian women in this and in many other respects will
probably depend. It is to give women themselves the
constitutional means, through their status in the new
Constitution, of freeing themselves from the evils from
which we have so signally failed to free them.
As I write, the work of the Joint Select Committee
on Indian Constitutional Reform is winding to its close.
It is expected to report before Easter ; within two years
at most the new constitution of India is likely to be
on the Statute Book. The future then passes into the
hands of new governments and legislatures responsible
to new and untried electorates. Governments, legis¬
latures, electorates, composed of whom? Hitherto,
authority in India has been practically an all-male
authority. A handful of women assigned to special jobs
in hospitals, schools, colleges, inspectorates — scarcely
a single woman anywhere, in any department,1 with
1 Save possibly in the Departments of Education, where, I
believe, there is in several provinces a woman director in a
position to perform the above functions.
77
THE INDIAN MINOTAUR
authority to survey and report generally on the needs
of her sex within that department ; in most Provincial
Councils one woman, seldom two, nominated by the
Government; none in the Legislative Assembly of the
Centre, though the Viceroy could have nominated
women ; a sprinkling of women on municipal and other
minor local bodies; a negligible fraction of women
voters (less than one woman to twenty men) in an
electorate itself narrowly restricted. That is the extent
to which women, fortified by any recognized status or
authority, have so far been called to help in the solution
of problems and unparalleled difficulties affecting the
lives, health, and happiness of millions of women,
many of whom may not even see or speak to or even
have their names mentioned to a man outside their
immediate family.
Is there not a case for changing all this in the new
and changed Constitution? There is indeed a case, so
strong that practically every commission, committee,
and conference that has considered the constitutional
problem has included a strong recommendation for an
enlarged women’s electorate. The Simon Commission —
whose report has now been erected into a kind of
Ark of the Covenant by the most conservative section
of British opinion — on this subject went further than
any other. Recognizing that in a country where the
great majority of women own no possessions except
what they wear on their persons, no lowering of the
property qualification would meet the case, the report
suggested that, in addition to women qualified by the
same property or educational qualifications as those
78
FUTURE REMEDIES : THE NEW CONSTITUTION
proposed for men, the wives and widows of men-
propertied voters should be placed on the register, but
at the age of twenty-five instead of the usual qualifying
age of twenty-one. This proposal — somewhat similar
to that applied to British women from 1918 to 1928 —
would result in an electorate of at least half as many
women as men, probably more.
The Lothian Committee, after six months’ investiga¬
tion on the spot, recommended considerable extensions
of the franchise for both the Central and Provincial
Legislatures, such as to yield for the Central Lower
Chamber an electorate of about 3-3 per cent of the
total population, for the Provincial Assemblies about
14- 1 per cent. For women, they proposed qualifications
calculated to result in a ratio of about one woman
voter to four and a half men. For the Central Legis¬
lature, this was effected by recommending that, in
addition to women possessing the property qualification
proposed for men, women who satisfied a simple test
of literacy (i.e. ability to read and write their own
language) should be placed on the register before the
first election, but that subsequent additions to the roll
must have achieved upper primary school standard.
For men, the educational qualification proposed was
matriculation or school-leaving standard. As to the
Provincial Legislatures, in addition to women qualified
by their own property or by the literacy test, it was
proposed to register the wives — not of all men-pro-
pertied voters, as in the Simon proposals — but of men
possessing the higher property qualification demanded
of Assembly voters. The condition of eligibility for both
79
THE INDIAN MINOTAUR
Central and Provincial Legislatures was to be the same
for both sexes, but in view of the small chance that at
present women would, except rarely, be successful in
open contests, it was proposed to reserve for women a
certain number of special seats in the several legislatures.
The White Paper proposals, which outwardly fol¬
lowed the main lines of the Lothian Report, inserted
two changes which would in fact deprive them of much
of their value. The first was to make the educational
test the same for both sexes, namely, matriculation or
school-leaving certificate for the Central Assembly and
for all the Provincial Legislatures except Madras, where
simple literacy was accepted. The second change was
to require the women qualified in respect of their
husbands’ qualification to make application for their
votes, at least at the first election. These wife voters
form about two-thirds of the proposed female electorate.
The White Paper admits that in the case of the
electorate for the Centre, its proposals would yield a
ratio of women voters no better than the present “less
than one woman to twenty men.” For the provinces,
the ratio would be potentially one woman to seven
men, but actually as much less as may result from the
condition concerning application. In view of all the
obstacles to the fulfilment of this condition — ignorance
among women that it exists, illiteracy, long distances,
purdah, etc. — many competent judges consider that
this condition, combined with the other change, may,
if it is insisted on, result in cutting down the women’s
vote to something little better than its present negligible
proportions. The dropping of the literacy qualification
80
FUTURE REMEDIES : THE NEW CONSTITUTION
is specially regretted by those who saw in it a means
of securing a gradual automatic increase in electoral
strength as women become more educated, and also
an incentive to all sections of opinion in India to extend
elementary education among their womenfolk, and so
improve their voting strength. The imposition of so
high a test as matriculation cannot have a corresponding
result; nor is it perhaps desirable that it should, since
it is generally admitted that too high a proportion of
educational effort in India has been directed to higher
education as compared with elementary and vocational
instruction. To lay it down that a girl who has
matriculated is judged by the State as worthy of a
vote, but not so one who has sought proficiency in
housewifery, midwifery, child welfare, etc., seems likely
only to encourage false standards of value in girls and
in their parents. The Lothian proposal to differentiate
between men and women in the matter of educational
qualification is amply justified by the grossly inadequate
share of educational opportunities hitherto offered to
girls by the Provincial Governments and elected bodies.
The policy of these was described by Sir Philip Hartog
as in effect : “Spend everything you reasonably can on
the boys, and if anything is left, spend it on the girls,”
and it has resulted in less than a seventh of the money
available for education being spent on the girls.1
The White Paper proposals are, of course, only
provisional. They are now under consideration by the
Joint Select Committee and by the Government.
1 Evidence before the Joint Select Committee on Indian Constitutional
Reform, 1933, No. Ci, p. 9.
8l
F
THE INDIAN MINOTAUR
Whatever these may propose, it is unlikely that Parlia¬
ment will make many changes in proposals so com¬
plicated and technical as those affecting the franchise
of far-away India, though even that hope must not be
abandoned if others fail us. In the interval before the
reporting of the Committee there is then an opportunity
— quickly passing, and for British men and women
never to recur — for those to make their influence felt
who believe that the best hope for remedying the
gigantic evils described in this book lies in the influence
of women themselves. If that can be mobilized and
brought to bear with sufficient weight on candidates,
elected bodies, and administrators, it may bring about
that ripening of public opinion the lack of which has
frustrated every previous effort at reform. But without
being cynics, we must admit that Governments and
elected bodies everywhere, and not least in India, are
apt to pay regard less to the real quality and quantity
of public opinion than to its power of making itself
effectively disagreeable if disregarded. There are con¬
stitutional and also unconstitutional ways of making
oneself disagreeable to authority. If the women of
India are not to be driven to the adoption of such
methods as British women in the pre-war decade and
the Congress movement in India have adopted to force
attention to their grievances, they must be adequately
provided with the constitutional means of protest.
For this purpose a voting strength of a twentieth or
even an eighth of the electorate is too small to be
effective. The future Indian administrations will be
very poor and beset by many vociferous claimants.
82
FUTURE REMEDIES : THE NEW CONSTITUTION
To whom will they listen — to men who have nineteen-
twentieths or seven-eighths of the electors behind them
and most of the education, money, and organizing
experience, or to women who have the measure of
strength represented by the White Paper proposals?
No doubt Indian women will have the support of many
enlightened men. But public men are naturally
responsive chiefly to the needs of their own constituents
and of those whose grievances are constantly before
their eyes. One might suppose that it would have been
agitation among British working men that led to such
reforms in this country as widows’ pensions, maternity
benefit, separation and maintenance for ill-treated
wives, etc. But in fact it was women of all classes who
led the agitation for these reforms, and since women
became a substantial part of the electorate the pace of
advance has enormously quickened. It was noted in
evidence before the Joint Select Committee that in
Great Britain during the first eighteen years of this
century only four Acts were passed relating specially
to the position of women; during the first nine years
following their enfranchisement some twenty such
Acts were passed. It is sometimes said that ignorance,
superstition, and priestly influence make of Indian
women themselves a reactionary force. To some extent,
and especially among the older women, this may be
true. But it is contrary to human nature and common
sense to suppose that women who day by day suffer
themselves and see their children suffer from the cruel
evils discussed in this book will long neglect to use the
constitutional means of remedying them, if they are
83
THE INDIAN MINOTAUR
given the chance. Further, as every experienced
politician knows, the opinion to which Parliaments and
Governments yield is usually that, not of the inert and
inarticulate mass, but of the organized who speak on
their behalf. So far as women’s opinion in India is
articulate, it is universally on the side of social reform.
Every travelling commission and committee has borne
witness to this. The Joshi Committee testified that the
evidence given by women in every province was
strongly against child marriage. Similarly, the Indian
Franchise Committee testified that “in every province
women, including some in strict purdah, came forward
as witnesses, either representing organizations or
individually, asking for an extension of the franchise,
while there has been no expression of opinion to the
contrary, written or oral, from the women themselves.”
Indeed, on the political issue, Indian women have
shown themselves more uncompromising than those
British women who have been fighting on their behalf
have thought it wise to be. A British Committee for
Indian Women’s Franchise, to which most of the large
women’s organizations are affiliated, formed when the
White Paper was issued to try to secure improvements
in its proposals, has been steadily working to secure a
return to the Lothian Committee’s proposals, or such
alternatives as would secure at least that Committee’s
proposed ratio of one woman to four and a half male
voters. Some sections of Indian women take the same
line; but their largest organization — the All-India
Women’s Conference — has gone all out for complete
adult franchise, or, failing that, adult franchise in urban
84
FUTURE REMEDIES : THE NEW CONSTITUTION
districts, with no special qualification for wives and,
above all, no reservation of seats to be filled on a
communal basis. The members of the Indian women’s
movement, in which the Simon Commission saw a
possible future “key of progress” for India, pride
themselves above all on having kept free from the evil
of communalism. As, however, the allocation of the
women’s reserved seats among the different com¬
munities formed part of the Prime Minister’s Communal
Award, announced in the summer of 1932 after the
failure of the Indians to come to an agreement on the
subject, there does not seem much probability of
concessions on this point, although on the question as
to how these seats should be filled — whether by separate
or joint electorates — the Government does not appear
to have finally committed itself. As to the importance
of securing an adequate measure of franchise, there is
no difference of opinion among Indian or British
women so far as either have declared themselves.
Witnesses have appeared before the Joint Select
Committee, and memoranda and resolutions have been
poured in upon it representing the views of many
different sections of women’s opinion, but all agreeing
both as to the necessity for an adequate franchise and
in the belief that nothing less than the ratio of one
woman to four and a half men proposed by the Lothian
Committee can be considered adequate, even as a
temporary measure. All these attach special importance
to the literacy qualification, less for its immediate result
in numbers, which would be inconsiderable, than as a
provision for future increase.
85
THE INDIAN MINOTAUR
Sharply as conservative opinion is divided in this
country on the Indian question, on this aspect of it
there seems no reason for division. Those who follow
Mr. Churchill condemn the extent of constitutional
advance proposed by the Government. But with few
exceptions they are willing to go as far as the proposals
of the Simon Commission (except in respect to the
transfer of “law and order”) ; and on the women’s
question, as already mentioned,1 the Simon Com¬
mission suggested a wider extension of the franchise,
and spoke out as decidedly as any succeeding body. It
may indeed be claimed that the facts and arguments
set out in this book should make a special appeal to
those whose objections to the White Paper are based
on their belief in British trusteeship for the Indian
masses and their disbelief in the present fitness of
Indian administrations to do justice to these masses. To
those who take this view, democratic institutions for
India may seem a mistake, paternal government far
preferable. But at least let them see to it that, if they
are beaten in the main issue, the democratic institutions
they deplore shall include full representation for the
oppressed as well as for the oppressors. Otherwise they
may find that in their efforts to stop the launching of
a ship they think unseaworthy, the only thing they
have succeeded in stopping is a proper provision of
life-belts.
On the other hand, those who believe (as I do
myself) in the necessity for a constitutional advance on
the scale contemplated by the Government, and also
1 See p. 78.
86
FUTURE REMEDIES : THE NEW CONSTITUTION
those who would go even further than that, are even
more bound to recognize the gravity of their responsi¬
bility for those whose destinies they are about to hand
over. There is much vague talk about “self-government”
for India. But India contains 353 million individuals.
An electoral system falling short of adult suffrage can
only be described as self-government if the enfranchised
sections are so selected as to secure fair representation
of the interests of the unenfranchised. The Government
considers it possible to go beyond the measure of
advance recommended by the Simon Commission
because of the discovered willingness of the Princes of
Indian States to enter into a federal system. The
adhesion of the Princes and their declared loyalty to
the British connexion may be a safeguard for British
interests. But is there anything in the past record either
of the Princes or of the mass of Indian men of the
better-to-do classes, who will be the chief recipients of
political power, that assures us that here are people to
whom we may safely entrust the future of the women
of India, confident that they will do their utmost to
rescue women from the frightful evils that oppress
them, and that, fortified only by such meagre help from
the women themselves as the White Paper proposals
permit them to render, they will succeed where we
have failed?
Before accepting this position, let it be remembered
that, for British people at least, it is a choice once for
all. The Secretary of State plainly indicated to the
Joint Select Committee that, in his opinion, future
extensions of the franchise should be left entirely to
87
THE INDIAN MINOTAUR
Indian legislatures, subject only to a right reserved to
Parliament to interfere “if satisfied that the Federal
Legislature and the Provincial Legislatures are not
carrying out their duties fairly.”1 Such a right is
obviously very unlikely to be exercised, and is a very
much weaker safeguard for the unenfranchised than
the proposal of the Simon Commission, that after
fifteen years a Franchise Commission should review the
progress made “so that the transferred powers may not
remain in the hands of an oligarchy.”2 But even if this
wiser proposal is adopted, it will be* impossible to
redeem for women the lost ground if their needs have
been left out of account during the early formative
years of the new Constitution. Claims will have been
pegged out; vested interests will have grown up;
women will find themselves still in the old position of
eating up the scraps that are left after masculine
appetites have been satisfied. Besides, the evils from
which Indian women suffer, especially that of child
marriage, are too cruel and too devastating in their
effects on the vitality of the race for us to be satisfied
that for fifteen more years they should go on unchecked
because reformers have not behind them the driving
force which only women themselves are likely to
supply. The time to act is now , while the Constitution
of India is being rebuilt from its foundations. I suggest
that all who share this view should give effect to it
through all the usual means of Parliamentary pressure
— by individual letters and resolutions from all kinds
1 Evidence before the Joint Select Committee, No. 20, p. 817.
2 Report of the Simon Commission, Vol. II, p. 94, par. 109.
88
FUTURE REMEDIES : THE NEW CONSTITUTION
of organized bodies, sent to the Chairman of the Joint
Select Committee on Indian Constitutional Reform
and to the Parliamentary representatives of those who
take action, urging that the measure of enfranchisement
granted to women should at any rate be not less than
the one woman voter to four and a half men voters
proposed by the Lothian Franchise Committee.
OFFICIAL EXPRESSION OF OPINION ON
WOMEN’S FRANCHISE
THE SIMON COMMISSION
“We desire to see a substantial increase in the present
ratio of women to men voters. If this is not effected
now, the situation will later on be reached when so
large a proportion of adult men are on the register,
and so few women, that a further extension to bring
the number of women voters more nearly to an equality
(even if the Provincial Councils as then constituted
proposed it) would necessitate the sudden admission of
vast numbers of women with hardly any increase in
the number of men. It is far better to proceed gradually
and steadily, and a further step in developing women’s
suffrage in India should be taken now. Some qualifica¬
tion other than the present one is needed, and it is
very difficult to suggest the most satisfactory method.
It may perhaps be found possible to add to the present
qualification two others, viz. (i) being the wife, over
twenty-five years of age, of a man who has a property
qualification to vote, and (2) being a widow over that
age, whose husband at the time of his death was so
qualified. In addition, the educational qualification
should apply to women over twenty-one as well as to
men. Many will be disposed to say that Indian wives
and widows are so largely uneducated or living in
seclusion that their enfranchisement to this extent is
premature and extravagant. We do not think so. The
beginning of a movement among certain Indian
9°
FUTURE REMEDIES ! THE NEW CONSTITUTION
women, however comparatively few in number they
may yet be, to grapple with problems which specially
affect home and health and children is one of the most
encouraging signs of Indian progress, and we believe
that the movement would be strengthened by increasing
the influence of women at elections.55
Report of the Indian Statutory Commission , Vol. II, p. 93-
speech DELIVERED BY HIS MAJESTY THE KING-EMPEROR
TO THE ROUND TABLE CONFERENCE, NOVEMBER 12,
“The material conditions which surround the lives
of My subjects in India affect Me nearly, and will be
ever present in your thoughts during your forthcoming
deliberations. I have also in mind the just claims of
majorities and minorities, of men and women, of town-
dwellers and tillers of the soil, of landlords and tenants,
of the strong and the weak, of the rich and the poor,
of the races, castes, and creeds of which the body
politic is composed. For these things I care deeply.
I cannot doubt that the true foundation of self-
government is in the fusion of such divergent claims
into mutual obligations and in their recognition and
fulfilment.55
Report of 1930-31 Conference , pp. 15-16,
THE ROUND TABLE CONFERENCE
“No system of franchise can be considered as satis¬
factory or as likely to lead to good government where
such a great disparity exists between the voting strength
9i
THE INDIAN MINOTAUR
of the two sexes. We do not anticipate that the
recommendations we have already made will reduce
the disparity, nor do we think that they provide
sufficiently for the enfranchisement of women. We
therefore agree that special qualifications should be
prescribed for women.”
Report of 1930-31 Conference , p. 58.
PRIME minister’s INSTRUCTIONS TO THE INDIAN FRANCHISE
COMMITTEE (LOTHIAN COMMITTEE)
“His Majesty’s Government attach special impor¬
tance to the question of securing a more adequate
enfranchisement of women than the existing system
which applies to women the same qualifications as to
men, and has produced a women’s electorate numbering
less than one-twentieth of the total male electorate.”
Report of Indian Franchise Committee , p. 81.
THE LOTHIAN FRANCHISE COMMITTEE
“Theoretic equality under a restricted franchise
means in practice extreme inequality.”
Report of the Indian Franchise Committee , p. 82.
THE WHITE PAPER
“His Majesty’s Government fully appreciate the
importance of a large women’s electorate for the
Federal Assembly.”
p. 12.
“His Majesty’s Government are very anxious to
92
FUTURE REMEDIES ! THE NEW CONSTITUTION
secure that the proportion of women electors should
be adequate and further consideration of the above
arrangements may be necessary.5 5
p. 94. (The reference here is to the conditions
attached to the provincial franchise.)
So it is still not too late !
93
CHAPTER IV
FUTURE REMEDIES:
II. THROUGH THE EDUCATION OF PUBLIC
OPINION BY METHODS OLD AND NEW
I have described the causes which, by general admis¬
sion, have led to the almost complete failure of the
Sarda Act and of previous efforts to control child
marriage. But the root cause of all these specific
reasons for failure is plainly this : that there have not
been people in sufficient numbers caring sufficiently
to insist that “this thing must stop,” and to back their
resolution by the kind of prolonged, well-thought-out,
extensive and intensive effort which, as every ex¬
perienced reformer knows, alone suffices to bring about
the destruction of any evil which is deeply rooted in
the customs of great masses of people.
One method of supplying that lack is to bring women
in large numbers into the political arena. But that,
though the most effective and immediate step to be
taken, is not the only step, nor would it by itself suffice.
Opinion among women is more readily responsive on
this subject than among men, but among both it needs
to be educated and mobilized before it will be effective.
It is necessary on this subject to be both frank and
fair. I can find no justification myself for the view
put forward by Miss Mayo in the sequel volume to her
Mother India,1 that the Sarda Act was a calculated
1 Volume II, Jonathan Cape, 1931.
94
FUTURE remedies: education
fiasco, designed by Hindu nationalists simply to
placate Western opinion. As I have tried to show,
the Government of India must take its full share of
responsibility for the feeble and unworkable form in
which the Act was allowed to pass, and they have
steadily opposed every subsequent attempt to either
amend, end, or further weaken it. There is no indica¬
tion in the debates on the Bill that any section of the
Assembly — certainly not the official bloc , certainly not
the Muslims — were willing to go further than the
Hindus. All sections alike, excepting the representatives
of orthodox opposition, showed what is to me an
evidently sincere horror and concern at the revelations
of the Joshi Report and desire to do something ; but also
a lack of the steely determination that alone could
have made that something effective. Their emotions
were a summer thunderstorm which, having shot its
futile bolt, cleared away and left the Government,
the Assembly, and its members free to pursue the
objects for which their masculine selves and their
masculine supporters really and permanently care.
But since thunderstorms are unpleasant and nobody
cares to be reminded of sufferings which their own
ill-directed efforts have done nothing to relieve and
something to aggravate, most of these persons have
shown some skill ever since in evading the subject of
child marriage and of the Sarda Act. When it is
unkindly pressed upon them, they murmur uneasily
that “public opinion is not ripe.” What are they
doing; what is anybody doing to ripen it?
It is hard for an outsider in England to answer
95
THE INDIAN MINOTAUR
certainly. But as the Government has practically
admitted (see p. 53), the answer is that Governments
and elected bodies are doing nothing, absolutely
nothing, except to warn their servants off the “delicate
question.” When in Calcutta in 1932, I was invited
to broadcast a simple talk on the franchise during
the women’s hour. This hour, it was explained, was
among the most popular of the day’s programme,
and the talks, translated into the vernacular by a clever
Bengali, an excellent medium of popular education.
But the Sarda Act was specially mentioned as an
example of the kind of controversial subject which
must be avoided. The broadcasting station is largely
subsidized by the Government. A strange situation,
surely, when an Act already on the Statute Book,
with Government’s full approval, may not be explained
to those whom it vitally concerns through one of the
few semi-Governmental mediums available (where it
exists) for reaching secluded women ! A still more recent
visitor to India, specially concerned to investigate the
subject, reports a general atmosphere of apathy and
pessimism even among social workers about the
Sarda Act: “Unfortunately, public opinion is not
strong enough.” Again, what are they doing to
strengthen it?
Small efforts here and there are recorded.
Occasionally, as mentioned before, a reforming
society has interfered to prevent or prosecute the
promoters of a marriage in contravention of the Act.
At conferences of women’s organizations resolutions
on the subject are a regular feature. In a few towns
96
FUTURE remedies: education
the women’s societies have set up Sarda Committees
which undertake to prosecute themselves or to find the
necessary security of ioo rupees in suitable cases.
A well-directed effort of the kind occurred in 1932
when I was in Bombay. A society of Indian women in
a neighbouring town, after waiting for two cases where
the brides were so young that there could be no doubt,
lodged their information and their security. In the
interval before the case was heard the priests of the
district took fright and declined to perform any more
child marriages till the result was known. Fortunately,
the delay carried them into a period when marriages
were considered inauspicious, so that the ladies
reckoned that they had rescued from premature
matrimony several score of little girls for that year
at least. Such efforts are well worth while, since every
individual life is an end in itself. But as a contribution
towards the whole problem, their extent can be measured
by the figures already given: 473 prosecutions under
the Sarda Act in two and a quarter years, only 167 of
them successful; and against that over 6 million more
child husbands and wives in 1931 than in 1921.
Obviously, a much bigger and better co-ordination
of machinery and effort is needed, and behind that
machinery a driving power of human wills which,
as compared to anything now exerted, shall be as a
central power station to the pair of hands behind
a baby’s pram.
We need not despair. Those who most dislike the
aims or methods or both of the non-co-operation
movement in India must admit that at least they have
97
G
THE INDIAN MINOTAUR
revealed in Indian men and women a capacity for
ingeniously devised, sustained, and self-sacrificing
effort for a common cause sufficient to secure the
success of any cause well enough based on the realities
of human needs to deserve success.
First, as to machinery: I suggest with deference
that there should be set up an organization called the
All-India Society for the Abolition of Child Marriage —
or some such title — with a branch in every provincial
capital and a committee or local correspondent in any
other centre where suitable individuals can be found
to serve. This organization should have the threefold
object of educating opinion as to the evils of child
marriage; enforcing the Sarda Act as far as possible;
and working to strengthen it by amendment. The
central committee at Delhi and also the branch com¬
mittees should be mainly but not exclusively Indian,
and as influential and representative as is compatible
with the excluding of persons too prudent or self-
regarding ever to want to do anything unpopular.
In its educational work the committees would use
the ordinary propaganda methods of leaflets, talks,
cinema films, and (if permitted) broadcasting. Leaflets
have already been drawn up, translated into various
vernaculars and circulated through various missionary
societies, on the initiative of a London body — the
Indian Village Welfare Association. Cinema films
of the simple type that can be shown after dark in the
open air and explained by talks are specially suitable
for village work. But clearly no educational methods
are likely to extend far or fast unless local governing
98
FUTURE remedies: education
bodies can be shaken out of their attitude of impassivity
to the extent of admitting that, when an Act intended
to safeguard the health of the people has been placed
and maintained for four years on the Statute Book,
it cannot be wrong to encourage their servants and
bodies subsidized by them to help in explaining and
enforcing its provisions in such ways as fit in with the
performance of their ordinary duties. Government
machinery is the only kind of machinery that does in
divers ways cover the whole ground. Missionary bodies,
which come next in extent, have on the whole shown
a greater boldness which can be less reasonably
expected of them, since they are dependent for the
success of the religious work which is their main
object on not running too much counter in secular
matters to the prejudices of those among whom they
work.
In promoting its second object, the enforcement
of the Sarda Act, the society would endeavour to
get round the main difficulties which have hitherto
impeded its working. It would make it known that
information concerning marriages performed or planned
in defiance of the Act could be sent privately — even
anonymously — to the nearest committee or its local
correspondent. It would make private inquiries as to
the genuineness of such information from such sources
as were available — local officials, missionaries, doctors,
teachers. If satisfied that there was a sufficient prima
facie case, it would lay the complaint before the Court
and provide the necessary security. In cases of a
marriage not already accomplished, it would send or
99
THE INDIAN MINOTAUR
convey a written or verbal warning to the offenders,
and, if that proved practicable, endeavour to induce
the District Judge to issue an injunction forbidding it.
After a successful prosecution, the committee would
extend such protection as seemed possible to the girl-
wife, by warning the husband’s family of the danger
of further prosecution if the marriage was consum¬
mated before the legal age; perhaps by providing
safe custody for her till that age. For all these purposes
it would be necessary for the society to have panels
of doctors, lawyers, and women workers who would
undertake to give voluntary help in the necessary
inquiries and preparation of evidence.
Through these two forms of practical work the
society would accumulate an amount of experience
concerning the state of public opinion and the deficien¬
cies of the Sarda Act that would place them in a very
strong position for demanding and organizing agitation
for its amendment.
It is easy in imagination to plan such an organiza¬
tion. In this country we are accustomed to see its
like in working for every big reform that has captured
the imagination of any large group of sensitive and
lively minds — such questions as international peace
and housing reform to-day, temperance and the
emancipation of women before the war. Such move¬
ments, when widespread enough, make their objects
“news,” which forces its way in some form or another
every day into every newspaper. They overcome the
resistance of active and passive selfishness and force
Governments to take action. In the horrible facts of
ioo
FUTURE remedies: education
Indian child marriage and its kindred evils lies ample
material and justification enough for such a movement.
And yet — I am impelled to confess my inner con¬
viction that it will not happen; not until and unless
the Indian Minotaur meets its Theseus. In most
countries, and in India perhaps more than most,
reason is not enough ; the orderly presentation of
accumulated facts is not enough; even day-to-day
experience of the evil and innumerable horrors such
as are recounted in the nine volumes of the Joshi
Committee’s evidence are not enough. Just because
such facts have been staring the people of India in
their faces all their lives they cannot see them. It will
require an eye-opener of the quality of an earthquake
or a volcano to make them see them.
Where is the volcano? It may be sleeping even now
in the personality of some Indian woman capable of
kindling in the hearts of thousands of her countrymen
and women the flame that burns in her own as she
broods on these evils and of inspiring them to devote
to their removal not a few idle hours in otherwise
preoccupied days, but all the activities of their bodies,
minds, and hearts, for months and years ; if necessary,
for all the years of their lives. It has been only so, in
all countries and ages, that widespread, deep-rooted
evils have been overcome. You cannot remove a
mountain with teaspoons. Or, rather, perhaps you
can, but only if the teaspoons are as many, and the
hands that ply them as industrious, as the ants in a
thousand ant-heaps. Indian men have pointed the
way. Mr. Gandhi, though he has not forborne — what
IOI
THE INDIAN MINOTAUR
leader would? — the opportunity of using women when
he wanted them for his own cause, has sometimes
shown a certain contempt for the woman who neglects
the jobs which only she can do. With masculine
inconsistency — since no one has more tenaciously
insisted on votes and seats for the objects of his special
care, the Untouchables — he has asked : —
“May women always throw the blame on men
and salve their consciences? . . . They may fight,
if they like, for votes for women. It costs neither
time nor trouble. It provides them with innocent
recreation. But where are the brave women who
will work among the girl-wives and girl- widows,
and who would take no rest and leave none for men,
till girl-marriage became an impossibility?”1
And among men in official circles we find Mr. Justice
Nanavutty, Judge of the Chief Court of Oudh at
Lucknow, declaring that “until the women of the
country take up this cause in right earnest, the generality
of men, who look upon them as their playthings, will
not really and seriously bestir themselves.”2
In the past there have been Indian women, such as
the Rani of Jhansi in the days of the Mutiny and
Pandita Ramabai in a generation only just passing
away, who have shown great powers of inspiring and
leading others through their own example of bravery
and devotion. During recent years the bolder (or
perhaps the more emotional) spirits among Indian
1 Young India, October 7, 1926.
2 Evidence before the Joshi Committee , Vol. IX, p. 243.
102
FUTURE remedies: education
women have mostly been drawn into the Congress
movement either as active workers or as passive sym¬
pathizers. Women in their thousands, some of them
emerging from purdah for the first time, have flung
themselves into the movement, taken their full share
in picketing shops for the sale of liquor and foreign
cloth, led processions, addressed meetings, faced lathi
charges, courted and endured imprisonment. The
numbers sentenced for political offences or confined
as political detenues in 1932 alone was 3,196. Two
incidents may serve as examples of their efforts : —
“On September 9, 1930, the Legislative Assembly
Elections were to take place in Bombay ; the Gandhi
party wanted them boycotted, as they were a form
of co-operation with Government which it did not
wish to tolerate at the height of the non-co-operation
movement. Seventeen inches of rain fell during
thirty-six hours, yet women went out in hundreds to
all the polling booths to picket, despite the torrential
rains. They did this so effectively that the election
had to be postponed for that day. The next day they
did another twelve hours5 regular picketing, fresh
contingents continually replacing the old in a
smooth-running and perfect organization. But by
now the police were ready for them, and four
hundred women were arrested, only to be met with
immense jubilation the moment they were released
again.
“On the day of the liquor licence auction in
Bombay women formed an unbroken line round
103
THE INDIAN MINOTAUR
the entire building in which it was to be held. Their
boycott was so successful that Government obtained
the merest fraction of former revenues. The following
year the same auction was announced three times,
because the bidders, remembering the previous year’s
experience, were afraid and did not attend. Private
treaties of sales behind closed doors had at last to be
resorted to, for the boycott by the women was so
effective that the auction could not take place.”1
Whatever we may think of the Congress movement —
of its objectives or of the expediency of its methods — we
cannot wonder nor wholly regret that Indian women
should have made common cause with their men in a
great uprising of national consciousness. The alterna¬
tives — passivity or a conflict of aims — would be a poor
augury for the future co-operation of men and women
in citizenship and the common affairs of life. But all
the same, what an example of the queer misfit between
human activities and human needs that the thing that
has broken the age-long silence of the Indian woman
and brought her into revolt is not her sense of the
unjust laws and cruel customs which beset her own lot,
but a demand for “responsibility at the centre,”
“Dominion status,” “complete swaraj.” The explana¬
tion, perhaps, is that the women who have revolted
have not been those who have suffered.
Fortunately, sometimes unfortunately, qualities
evolved in one kind of contest can be transferred to
1 Purdah , by Frieda Hauswirth (Mrs. Sarangadhar Das), p. 233
(Kegan Paul, 1932).
104
FUTURE remedies: education
another. I do not suggest that the methods employed
should be the same. It is indeed one of the chief causes
of failure or delay in great reforming movements that
those who have forged instruments suitable for use in
one stage of the movement seldom perceive when the
moment has come for abandoning those instruments
for others, for beating swords into ploughshares or
ploughshares into swords. Even those who believed in
the necessity for non-co-operation in the early stages of
the Indian nationalist movement have mostly come to
realize how enormously the withdrawal of the more
active and ardent reforming spirits from the tasks of
legislation and administration has injured the working
of the instalments of self-government already granted
and the chance of shaping the new Constitution into
forms which will really safeguard the interests of the
poor and the oppressed. It would be a still greater
disaster if, when the new regime begins, those women
who have the qualities of leadership were to be found
too much absorbed in unconstitutional or even in
extra-constitutional efforts to make full use of the
opportunities which it offers them to achieve their
ends — assuming indeed that the opportunities offered
are large enough to make usage effective. The engine
of democracy can remove a mountain by tunnelling
through it more effectively than a volcano which merely
blows the top off. It can; but when it does not, it is
either because the engine is not big enough, or
because the spirit that gives it driving-force is not
inside it.
Those of us who perforce must watch this question
105
THE INDIAN MINOTAUR
from outside, from a far-away land whose control over
India’s destinies has never effected her delivery and is
steadily lessening, can only watch and wait to see
whether among the women of India, whose noble
qualities of heart and brain we have learned to admire,
there will be found some to supply this driving-power.
They will need powers of initiative and persistency far
greater than were ever called out by the mere duplica¬
tion of men’s efforts for men’s purposes, and they may
need a courage as great. They may even find before
their task is done that it has led them into strange
paths and exacted a heavy price; not only in the self¬
dedication of years of effort, but in unpopularity and
misunderstanding, the alienation of friends, and discord
in families. For evils so widespread and deeply rooted
in the customs of the people as this we have been
considering do not, as its whole history shows, give way
easily. It would indeed be rash for an outsider to express
any dogmatic opinions as to the methods that should
be used. The tactics and the ethics of great reforming
movements always raise difficult questions, of which
the solution must depend on considerations, material
and psychological, which can only be rightly weighed
by those in close and continuous contact with the
people for whom and upon whom they have to work.
But as a result of much pondering on the subject, aided
by the light of a long experience of the women’s
movement in my own country, I venture to submit
certain reflections for the consideration of Indian
women.
First, then, whatever the laws of a country may be,
106
FUTURE remedies:
EDUCATION
no reforming methods can be justified which run
counter to the moral law. We must not do evil that
good may come. Under some circumstances, to disobey
statutory law may be right as a means of forcing
reform. But under a democracy, or even in the sort of
half-way house between oligarchy and democracy
which the White Paper proposals foreshadow for India,
the means used to secure every reform should be within
the limits of the law. If it is otherwise, the enemies of
democracy will be supplied with just the excuse they
want, and in these days are only too ready to take, for
overthrowing democracy or refusing its further advance.
Also, no one can honestly combine law-breaking with
the work of making and administering laws, and the
best and boldest minds among India’s women will be
too badly needed in the constitutional sphere for them
to let themselves be deviated from that sphere.
But that does not imply that the only methods used
in a great campaign against child marriage must
necessarily be the ordinary humdrum methods of
the politician, the research worker, the educationalist.
These may together construct the engine that will
tunnel through the mountain ; but it is doubtful
whether they can by themselves supply the spirit that
will drive the engine. To fire men and women to make
the effort necessary to overcome great obstacles you
must kindle their imaginations, and through these their
emotions. Reason makes a good steady-burning coal,
but a bad kindling wood. And if that is true even in
countries where everybody over ten years old can read
and write, how much more true it must be in a land
107
THE INDIAN MINOTAUR
where the vast majority of the people can only be
reached through the eye and the ear.
How can they be made to see and to listen? In one
respect the fighters in a campaign against child
marriage would have an immense advantage over most
reformers. They have already the law and the opinion
of most educated and all enlightened people on their
side. The law is ignored or openly flouted because its
opponents — reactionaries who in other respects beside
child marriage would plunge India back into barbarism
if they got the chance1 — have been able to confront it
with a dead weight of social disapproval, evoked by
appeals to superstition masked as religion, and so far
there has been no corresponding force on the other
side. The fortress of child marriage has been easily
held, because there have really been no besiegers;
nothing but an occasional ball from one far-distant
light cannon. But social disapproval is a weapon which
both sides can use. Is it not about time that those on
the other side should take the field and evince their
social disapproval of child marriage and of all who
practise or connive at it, in ways that will knock at
the doors of men’s minds and compel them to open
and listen?
There are many possible methods. Those I am about
to suggest are not original. Some are drawn from the
experience of the women’s suffrage campaign and of
other reforming movements in this country. Some have
1 See, for example, the opinions expressed by Mr. Acharaya
before the Joint Select Committee on the subject of suttee —
Evidence , No. 27, p. 1335.
108
FUTURE remedies: education
already been used in India for other purposes. They are
not, I hope, the worse for that. The women’s movement
has always been widely internationalized, and reformers
everywhere learn from each other. That a method has
sometimes been used for illegal purposes is not of itself
any argument against using it in the law’s defence. It
is a pity, as a famous evangelist used to remark, to let
the devil have all the best tunes. But the ingenuity of
Indian women may devise newer and better tunes;
improvements on the methods of the importunate
widow in the Bible.
Suppose, however, that instead of passing stereotyped
resolutions at occasional conferences, and conducting
here and there a prosecution leading to a fine which
has come to be regarded — so we are told- — as a possible
slight addition to the normal costs of a wedding,
Indian women’s societies were to organize gigantic
demonstrations and processions, illustrating in pictur¬
esque ways the evils of child marriage. Suppose they
were to conduct pilgrimages, by caravan and on foot,
through the villages, preaching their gospel through
speech and song and drama and cinema film. Suppose
some Indian Amy Johnson were to volunteer to reach
the less accessible regions by flying over them, scattering
showers of leaflets on the villages, and writing some
slogan on the sky. Such appeals would not fail, because
they would be reinforced by law, self-interest, pity,
family affection. The men and women of the villages,
as all who know them repeatedly assure us, may be
illiterate, but they are not stupid nor ill-disposed;
shrewd rather and kindly, fond of their homes and
109
THE INDIAN MINOTAUR
children, and not bad judges of sincerity of purpose in
others. If they have succumbed to the influence of
priests and money-lenders, it is because their rulers and
their more enlightened fellow countrymen have (in the
words of Sir Malcolm Hailey — see p. 122) never
deliberately attempted to effect the changes in their
psychology and in their social and personal habits,
without which their conditions cannot be materially
improved.
Turning from the governed to the governors, suppose
again women were to organize petitions and deputations
to every sort of elected body and to those whose duty
it is to administer the law, asking from each the service
it is in their power to render, the strengthening of the
law, the use of educational machinery to explain its
provisions, the prohibition by injunction of illegal
marriages and the prosecution of offenders against the
law governing age of consent. Suppose that, if authority
failed them, they were even to resort to the familiar
method of peaceful picketing, of those known to have
planned a child marriage, refraining from any kind of
physical obstruction, but entreating the offender to
abandon his intention. Suppose it were a rule in
women’s societies that any member who attended such
a marriage would lose her membership. Suppose the
members pledged themselves never to employ a servant
or buy from a trader or have any kind of social inter¬
course with those who had broken the law. Suppose
at election times every candidate were asked to put
the strengthening of the Sarda Act into his election
address. Suppose it became impossible for any politician
IIO
FUTURE remedies: education
to speak on any subject anywhere in India without
hearing the women’s cry, “What are you doing about
child marriage?”
Campaigns of this sort may and usually must have
small beginnings, but to be effective they must ulti¬
mately be organized on a great scale and require
considerable funds. In helping in the raising of these
we of the West might find means of paying part of our
unpaid debt to the East. But money-raising efforts may
themselves form part of an effective demonstration.
Savonarola’s Piagnoni induced people to burn their
ornaments and rich apparel. The reformers of this
materialistic age might sell theirs to raise funds, and
make the doing of it a symbol of the spirit of women
in mourning for their sisters.
In suggesting these sensational methods, I am
speaking against the grain. When similar methods were
first introduced into the women’s movement at home,
I disliked and despised them. But it became plain that
they had brought into the movement thousands of men
and women, and convinced millions more of its justice
who would have remained deaf for ever to appeals
addressed only to their reason, to arguments based on
justice, logic, economic necessity, and social hardship.
For one man capable of reasoned thought there are a
score who can only perceive and feel. On these,
sensational methods acted like advertisements blazing
from every hoarding. But they were redeemed from the
vulgarity of being merely that by the demonstrations
they afforded of women’s willingness to sacrifice leisure,
wealth, health, even liberty and life, to secure justice.
1 1 1
THE INDIAN MINOTAUR
When their promoters passed beyond that into methods
which inflicted injury on innocent people, instead of
merely enduring it themselves, even though it was only
empty churches and pictures and letters in letter-boxes
which they destroyed, their campaign provoked re¬
actions and ceased to be useful. I believe it to be
provable, though many would deny it, that militancy
in the later stages of our suffrage campaign when it
took these forms was retarding progress and not helping
it, and that if the Great War had not happened, giving
men an excuse for yielding gracefully a claim which
their minds had long conceded as just, success might
have been deferred for a generation.
I may be told that in India the danger of sensational
methods leading to excess is even greater; that such
methods are risky ; would give trouble to the authorities ;
might provoke reprisals or even riots. I recognize these
possibilities. It would require sagacious leadership to
keep such methods themselves within the law and to
minimize the risks. But it can scarcely be illegal to use
peaceful persuasion to induce people to keep the law
and to organize disapproval of those who break it.
Those who appealed to authority against such methods
would find themselves in as embarrassing a position as
the six-year-old bridegroom described in one of the
Provincial Census Reports. His wedding procession
having come to fisticuffs with another procession, he
brought his tale of woe to the Court, “but when the
ambiguity of his position under the Sarda Act was
explained to him, he effected a graceful withdrawal.”
As for risks, was ever a great reform effected without
I 12
FUTURE remedies: education
taking risks? And are there no risks, no certainties of
disaster, rather, in the position as we find it? The
spate of marriages before the Sarda Act came into
operation showed that the people expected to have to
obey it. Can it have improved their respect for law
and lawgivers to have found how small a show of
resistance was necessary to intimidate the Government
and the social reformers into complete inaction, even
to the extent of abstaining from all effort to educate
public opinion in the provisions of the law and the
necessity for it? The Government at the same period
was showing itself firm enough, ruthless even, in the
suppression of other kinds of law-breaking which
menaced the safety of its servants, commercial interests,
public peace. What conclusion can simple people, or
rather those who for their own ends have worked upon
their superstition, have drawn, but that this semi-alien
Government and these tiresome Indian innovators
were only showing off to impress Western opinion, and
would never seriously challenge men’s right to dispose
of their girl children as they please, of husbands to use
their girl-wives as they please, even if it means their
death, provided that the doing of it is kept decently
out of sight? The sufferings of these children, the
appalling maternal death-rate to which child marriage
is the chief contributing factor, the undermining of the
vitality of the race — do these things not justify the
taking of some risks? And if Governments shirk the
task, then I say let the women shame them by taking
it on to their own shoulders.
I may be told, again, by Indian women themselves,
1 13 H
THE INDIAN MINOTAUR
that the time for such a campaign is not yet ; that they
have a more immediate task to do in helping their men
to free India from alien rule. Here again I can only
speak the truth as I see it, and trust that my Indian
friends will forgive me if I say anything which gives
them pain. Those are the truest friends of Indians who
say to their faces what others only say behind their
backs. I believe that a general uprising of Indian
women against child marriage and its sister evils would
do more to forward the cause of Indian self-government
and to raise the repute of India in the eyes of the world
than any other single thing that it is in the power of
women to accomplish. To a far greater extent than
most Indians seem to realize, Indian constitutional
advance is regarded with misgiving even by those who
think it inevitable because of their deep-rooted horror
at the social evils that are tolerated in India, and
because of the conclusions they draw from the seeming
passivity and indifference even of many enlightened
Indians concerning them. The greater part of this book
has been devoted to showing what I believe to be the
British share of responsibility — the responsibility of
rulers who might have done more to stop these evils if
they had cared and dared more. But well I know the
retort that has been made to me a hundred times and
will be made again, not only by the cavemen who
follow Mr. Churchill, but by many who have given
years of service to India as officials, doctors, nurses,
missionaries, traders, and reckon scores of Indians
among their friends. It will be something of this sort : —
“If we have done little, it is because Indian public
1 14
FUTURE remedies: education
opinion has not backed us up, and Indians will do less.
The services of health and education have been trans¬
ferred for over ten years, their personnel largely
Indianized. In many respects and many places they
have not improved but deteriorated since the trans¬
ference. What have Indian administrators done to
improve the social services? They will spend nothing
they can avoid on health measures; least of all those
affecting women. They will vote money for secondary
and higher education, because they desire it for their
own sons and (more grudgingly) for their daughters,
as a help towards getting appointments for the boys
and husbands for the girls. But primary education is
starved, partly from reluctance to spend money on it,
partly because educated Indian youths will not teach
in the villages, and the women teachers cannot safely
live alone there. They would be regarded as the
natural prey of the members of the local bodies who
appointed them. Jobbery and nepotism are allowed to
decide appointments. The worst abuses are glossed
over, except when they can be used as a stick to beat
the British with. Indians are callous to suffering except
when it affects themselves, or when the attention
drawn to it hurts their self-esteem. Look at the Sarda
Act : how they clamoured for it and have let it become
a dead letter.55
I know also the answers made to these charges — a
limited responsibility, in which all but a minority are
debarred either by their poverty or by their political
opinions from taking part; the absorption of the best
men and women in the political struggle; the poverty
THE INDIAN MINOTAUR
of the country, and the heavy drain on it of the alien
administration and the military forces; the timid and
over-cautious attitude of British officials, willing to be
firm and bold only where British interests are concerned.
Let history decide between the two views ; but this at
least is certain, that neither history nor the individual
conscience will ever pronounce absolution for cruel
sufferings inflicted on countless innocent people merely
on the ground that the responsibility for inflicting or
permitting them is shared by others.
Meantime, while British and Indians continue to
bandy reproaches; meantime, while India is waiting
for the only thing that ever ends great wrongs — the
emergence of leaders great enough and near enough
to the sufferers to grapple with and slay this monster —
these things I have written about doubtless will go on.
The marriages of millions of little girls will be celebrated
amid festivities, in open defiance of the law, without
the voice or hand of authority or of a single man or
woman being raised to prevent it. Many of them will
suffer nothing worse than the loss of youth and liberty.
But many will suffer the conditions which together
“make for early death . . . with the silence and depth
of a strong tide at night.”1 And these deaths in child¬
birth will go on, the slow, agonizing, unnatural deaths
of women mostly in their twenties, their teens, some
not yet in their teens, at the rate of 200,000 every year,
or twenty every hour of every day and night.2 And
1 Mr. Justice Nanavutty, Judge of the Chief Court of Oudh at
Lucknow, before the Age of Consent Committee. See p. 32.
2 The estimate of the late Director of Medical Services in
India, Sir John Megaw.
1 16
FUTURE remedies: education
about all this less fuss, in the land where it takes place
and among the people who flatter themselves that they
have brought the blessings of Western civilization to
India, than took place in England, as one Indian
witness oddly remarked, over one unfairly treated girl
typist.1 Or if that seems an exaggeration, take this case.
During the hurly-burly of the war an able, highly
connected Englishwoman was unjustly dismissed, on
inadequate evidence hastily accepted, from an im¬
portant war-time post. An agitation for her rehabilita¬
tion was at once set up, and succeeded in securing an
inquiry too indeterminate in its findings, too considerate
of the officialdom responsible for her undoing, to
satisfy her or her champions, who included leaders in
the Church, editors of important newspapers, and
politicians of all shades of opinion. Ever since, year in,
year out, these have conducted a campaign to secure
her complete amends. I would that the twelve million
suffering child-wives of India had been half as successful
in enlisting knight-errants of their own race or mine.
Why, one asks oneself, does their fate excite so
extraordinarily small a share of interest and effort,
official and unofficial? It is not because there is any
doubt about the facts. Seldom can an indictment of
any social evil have rested upon solider rocks of fact
than the Joshi Report and the Census volumes from
which I have here chipped a few specimens. It is not
because the facts are not widely known. They are
known, more or less, to every Indian and to most
1 Mr. J. C. Mazumdar, Deputy Magistrate, Darjeeling;
Evidence before the Joshi Committee , Vol. VI, p. 336.
1 17
THE INDIAN MINOTAUR
British who have served in any civilian capacity in
India — known in the same sense in which we know the
air which so envelops us that we do not feel it. It is
not because men are consciously indifferent or pusil¬
lanimous in the face of suffering and pain. If a ship
foundered on its passage to India, there is scarcely a
man — though many had left behind dependent wives
and children — who would not obey that convention
which, in sublime disregard of real values, commands
them to see every puling baby and old maid with her
life behind her into the boats before they seek safety
themselves. There is scarcely a man who would let a
wild beast tear a young girl to pieces before his eyes
without lifting a finger to save her lest he got bitten.
Yet that would be a quick and easy death compared
to the fate which overtakes many of the victims of
child marriage. “Often die undelivered after days of
agony.55 “A girl of twelve and a half who suffered in
labour for seven days.55 “I saw a girl of twelve so badly
mutilated and her mental condition so badly affected
that she was quite demented. . . . Incidentally the
husband sued for restitution of conjugal rights and
won his case, so I was told.55 “She was only twenty-one,
but she had had seven children. I told her she was
not trying to get better. She said : Tt is no use, because
maternity comes on every year.5 She died of inanition
a few months later.55 “One hundred out of every
thousand girls are doomed to die in child-birth before
they cease to have children.55 “When they bring a
woman to hospital, they sometimes bring a rope along
with them, to tie the corpse to the bed when they
1 18
FUTURE remedies: education
carry it to burial. The men ask us to help, but remind
themselves that this is the usual lot of women.”
“The usual lot of women!” If I were a fundamen¬
talist, I think I should believe it to have been part of
the curse of Eve that nearly all men should be born
blind and deaf and dumb where the sufferings of
maltreated maternity were concerned. Otherwise how
is it possible that in the face of all these facts there
should be a “general concensus of opinion” among the
representatives of authority in India, central and local,
British and Indian, that they can do nothing, nothing
at all, not even explain and defend the law they
themselves have made? Do their minds never misgive
them? “At midnight, in the silence of the sleeptime,
when they set their fancies free,” are they never
haunted by the spirits of these nameless dead women,
more numerous than all the crosses on the Western
Front, who might, some of them, have been still living
in the sun if their governors, their trustees, had shown
more faith, resource, energy, courage?
Two years ago I visited the Memorial Gardens at
Cawnpore. This is one of the Englishman’s sacred
places in India. It commemorates the fate of the
women and children who, during the Mutiny, survived
General Wheeler’s heroic defence, only to be first
imprisoned and then butchered, by order of the Nana
Sahib, in the Bibi-Garh, and have their bodies thrown
into an adjoining well. On a mound raised over the
well is their monument — a figure of the Angel of the
Resurrection — and below it are the graves of other
massacred victims. As I wandered in that garden,
1 *9
THE INDIAN MINOTAUR
empty but for a few Indian guards, I felt as if I had
seldom been in so crowded a place. Faintly down the
years came the voices of those English women and
children ; but overwhelming and almost jostling them
out of the place consecrated to their memory were the
dusky shadows of other women and children, hosts
and hosts of them, generation after generation, who
had suffered imprisonment less rigorous but so much
more prolonged, leading as surely to a dark and terrible
death.
120
APPENDIX
NOTES ON SOCIAL CONDITIONS OTHER
THAN CHILD MARRIAGE AFFECTING
WOMEN IN INDIA
OFFICIAL EVIDENCE AS TO THE FAILURE OF THE GOVERN¬
MENTS IN INDIA TO COPE ENERGETICALLY WITH
HEALTH PROBLEMS
The Health Commissioner for India says (1930
Report) : —
“The health of the people is theoretically acknow¬
ledged by politicians, by financiers, and by leaders
of the commercial world to be of first importance,
but when these leaders of the nation come to deal
with the cold facts of an everyday world, and especi¬
ally with budgets which fail to balance, public health
is quietly but firmly pushed to one side with a
vague expression of hope that in the future some¬
thing more may be possible. In few countries of the
world have the public health budgets, even at their
highest, amounted to more than a penny or two per
head of the population; in India, the average
expenditure in many areas cannot possibly be more
than a tiny fraction of that humble coin. In these
circumstances, what chance is there for the develop¬
ment of a suitable health organization or what
opportunity can there be of utilizing, for the benefit
121
THE INDIAN MINOTAUR
of the people, the facts placed at our disposal by
medical and health research?” (P. 2.)
“ The larger municipalities are as a rule content with
meagre efforts for their women and children. . . .” (P. 160.)
Major-General W. R. Edwards, Director-General of
the Indian Medical Service, says : —
“I cannot understand why up to the present time
Government has taken no steps towards teaching the
people of India the elementary laws of health which
are of such vital importance to them.” (Quoted by
Dr. Lankester in his Tuberculosis in India.)
The Governor of the Punjab (Sir M. Hailey), intro¬
ducing Mr. Brayne’s book on village uplift, says of
the charge that the Government has neglected this
problem : —
“The charge is to this extent true, that we have
never made a direct and concentrated attack on this
problem; we have never deliberately attempted to
effect that change in the psychology of the peasant
or in his social and personal habits without which it
is impossible materially to improve his condition.”
The Director of Public Health for the Punjab
(Colonel Forster) said in evidence before the Lin¬
lithgow Commission: —
“Whilst every District Board will cheerfully incur
bankruptcy on account of the schools, no District
Board is willing to spend the smallest money of its
122
APPENDIX
income on Public Health projects which do not offer
some personal advantages to personal members of
the Board. . . . Although this district was afflicted
with an epidemic of plague responsible for over 400
deaths weekly, and also with a coincident epidemic
of small-pox, the total expenditure on Public Health
for a rural population of 898,609 was under £1,300”
(1*24 of total income of Board, p. 512). (P. 51 1.)
“Although the Province is always on the verge of
an epidemic, financial provision ... is always
hopelessly inadequate. When an epidemic breaks out
the District Board as a general rule does nothing,
on the plea that it has practically no funds — which
is true in the sense that it has made no provision.”
(P- 512.)
Little or No Progress in Maternity and Child Welfare
The Report of the Health Commissioner for India
(1930) says:—
“Advance in this branch of public health work is
extremely slow, and it is only by looking back over
a considerable number of years that we can appre¬
ciate progress at all. As stated in my last report, the
atmosphere of political disturbance and economic
depression is far from favourable to the development
of work among women and children. On the other hand ,
the fact that , in India , women have begun to enter public
life may be a hopeful augury for the future. Under the new
constitution many women will be enfranchised and some may
be nominated to the provincial and central legislative
123
THE INDIAN MINOTAUR
assemblies. Naturally their interests will focus on problems
which specially concern them , and we may hope that this will
be reflected in legislation affecting women and children .”
(P- I51-)
“The problems attending maternity work, and in
particular maternal mortality, show a depressing
tendency to remain completely unsolved — one is
tempted to say insoluble. That would, however,
present an unjustifiably pessimistic picture of the
situation. The figures for maternal mortality rates
show no improvement, in fact in many cases they
tend to increase. It must be remembered, however,
that the increase, in urban areas at least, is largely
due to improved registration and classification of
deaths, and that therefore comparative figures are
really no help in deciding whether improvement is
taking place or not.” (P. 152.)
“Unfortunately, hospitals and trained mid wives
are within the reach of comparatively few. The great
majority of births take place in villages where
hospitals do not exist and where trained midwives
find it hard to settle and earn a living. It is the
village conditions which create the real difficulty in
reducing maternal mortality rates or in providing
for skilled assistance for the time of child-birth. In
the villages, the only help available, in the majority
of cases, is that of the indigenous midwife whose
sole means of learning has been her experience.”
(?• 152-)
“Little accurate information as to the incidence
of tuberculosis in India is available, although the
124
APPENDIX
prevalence of the disease is believed by many medical
men to have increased rapidly during the last 15-20
years. This is to some extent evident even from the
rather scanty mortality figures recorded in a number
of the provinces.” (P. 74.)
“In Calcutta, for the year 1929, 2,834 deaths from
tuberculosis were registered. Of these, 2,591, or
91 per cent, were pulmonary cases. A very high
death-rate was recorded among young females
between the ages of 15 and 30 years; in the age-
group, 10-20 years, for every boy dying of tuber¬
culosis five girls died, and in the age-group 20-30
years, the proportions were one male to three
females. These tremendous differences are attributed,
inter alia , to early marriage, but probably other
factors play an equally important part.” (P. 79.)
Effects of Purdah on Health
Dr. Arthur Lankester says that : —
“In the whole of my tour through the cities of
India no single fact was more constantly brought to
my notice by ceaseless iteration than the direct
dependence of consumption upon the system of
purdah seclusion of women.” ( Tuberculosis in India ,
p. 140.)
To realize what purdah means, one must remember
that its conditions vary greatly in different castes,
communities, and classes. Among the very rich the
zenana may be spacious and luxurious. Among the
125
THE INDIAN MINOTAUR
poor, purdah is less common, but where it is observed
it may be so rigid that a woman may
“be confined in a small house, practically windowless,
or with openings high up in the walls, and she may
not leave the house even to fetch water for household
purposes. However poor the household, she can take
no share in the work, except for the cooking, which
she can do indoors. It has been said that a Rajputani
may not leave her house to fetch water though the
house may be in a jungle and the well in front of it.”
(Dr. Rukhmabai, M.D., Women in Modern India.)
But the conditions where the practice tells most
widely and hardly are, by general consent, those which
occur in the middle classes of castes which observe
purdah strictly, but cannot afford to provide spacious
apartments, and where, for the sake of privacy, the
rooms are at the back of the house and lighted only
by small windows high up, covered by glass or lattice-
work, often so fixed that they cannot be opened. The
following is one of many typical indictments : —
“To secure privacy, efficient lighting and ventila¬
tion are absolutely disregarded, the zenana or
women’s apartments being usually the most insanitary
part of the house. No wonder that tuberculosis, which
thrives in damp, dark, airless corners, plays havoc in
the zenanas.” (Health Officer of Calcutta, Report
for 1913.)
Dr. Kathleen Vaughan has made a special study of
126
APPENDIX
the effect of purdah in producing osteomalacia. She
shows that this disease occurs almost entirely among
women, usually in the child-bearing period of life, but
it often starts before marriage, when in the East the
girl goes into seclusion. It is due largely to absence of
sunlight, yet is specially characteristic of certain parts
of India. Its effect is to soften the bones, and often to
produce such marked deformity that natural labour
becomes impossible. Dr. Vaughan says of the bad
cases : —
“These cases always arrived at the hospital in a
state of extreme exhaustion, carried there on a bed
by the nearest men relatives, after every attempt had
been made for days at home by native midwives,
quite untrained women, who had exhausted every
device known to them to produce delivery. The
women arrived exhausted and septic, begging that
something should be done for them, they did not
mind what. The women who accompanied the
patient beat upon their breasts and wept; the men
asked us for help, but reminded themselves that this
was the usual lot of woman. Sometimes we saw that
they brought a rope with them, and this was a bad
sign, as they use a rope to bind a corpse to the bed
when carrying it for burial.5 5 (. Purdah System in its
Effect on Motherhood.)
Dr. Margaret Balfour also lays stress on the gravity
of this disease, and points out that in the rural districts,
where hospitals and skilled attendance are unavailable,
127
THE INDIAN MINOTAUR
the young mother often “dies undelivered after days
of agony.” Dr. Balfour points out that a still more
prevalent disease of pregnancy is anaemia, also asso¬
ciated with a secluded and inactive life in sunless
quarters.
The Medical Services
That bulky Blue Book, The Moral and Material
Progress of India (1931 edition), records the difficulties
experienced in keeping up the cadre of the Women’s
Medical Service to its maximum achieved number of
44, partly because of the difficulty of inducing the
Provincial Governments to pay half the salaries of these
women, as demanded by the Central Government.
Yet this tiny body of 44 officially employed women
doctors, bulked out by missions and by private practi¬
tioners into a total of about 600 fully qualified women
doctors and some semi-trained sub-assistant surgeons,
is the sole provision of female medical aid to meet the
needs of a female population of 1 3 1 millions, of whom
“very few [in the words of the same Blue Book] are
willing to see a man doctor except at the last moment.”
The Annual Report of the Countess of Dufferin’s
Fund, 1928, says: —
“If readers of this report will take the trouble to
peruse the individual reports from the Hospitals
officered by Women’s Medical Service doctors, they
cannot fail to be struck by the universal cry from
all the doctors from Karachi to Calcutta and else¬
where for more money for the supply of the barest
128
APPENDIX
necessities for these Hospitals. The Secretary, in her
inspection reports, has reiterated these appeals,
pointing out the urgent necessity for repairs and
additions to buildings and the inadequate supply of
equipment, bedding, and nursing staff. The fact has
to be recognized that Women's Hospitals receive scant
attention and still scantier support in almost all the Provinces
in India. They are not endowed and depend for their
support on doles from local bodies and subscriptions
from the public.”
Widowhood
The lot of the Hindu widow has been thus described
by Indian speakers. In 1927, speaking in the Legislative
Assembly, Kumar Garganand Sinha said : —
“I shall not take the time of the House by narrating
what Hindu widowhood means. There is no Hindu
who does not know it from practical experience in
his own household. It is a life of agony, pains and
suffering and austerity. It is a life which has been
inflicted not so much by Providence, not so much by
the Shastras, as by social customs.”
Dr. Muthulakshmi Reddi, speaking on child marriage
before her colleagues of the Madras Provincial Council,
said : —
“The saddest consequence of all is the presence of
a large number of child-widows in our midst whose
lot and status in a Hindu family is most deplorable.
We are too painfully conscious that the child-widows,
129
1
THE INDIAN MINOTAUR
for no fault of their own, are subjected to such
indignities and ill-treatment in a Hindu household
that their life is rendered very miserable indeed.”
While these unhappy facts are the result of social
custom, they can be affected by Government action in
three ways : —
(i) The suppression of child marriage and con¬
sequently of child widowhood.
(ii) Improvements in the law regarding inheritance.
Mr. M. R. Jayaker stated before the 41st Indian
National Social Conference, 1928, that legislation is
“most ugently needed to-day in improving the
position of the widow in a Hindu joint family. When
the husband dies undivided we are all aware of her
miserable lot. She cannot get the husband’s share if
she is without male issue. The rules under which
maintenance is decreed to her are unjust. They all
lean in favour of her husband’s co-parceners.”
(iii) Improved facilities for the training of widows
for wage-earning occupations.
The Civil Rights of Indian Wives and Widows
Even a brief summary is impossible here. But it may
be noted : —
(fl) That whereas polygamy is permitted to (though
increasingly uncommon among) both Hindu and
Muslim men, and whereas either can easily get rid
of an unwanted wife — the Hindu by setting her aside,
130
APPENDIX
the Muslim by divorcing her — there is for the women
of the Hindu community no legal means of escape,
whether by divorce or by separation, from a husband
however cruel. The most that the courts can do is
to refuse restitution of conjugal rights to the husband
of a deserting wife, if they judge that to return to
the husband’s household would be physically unsafe
for her.
(b) That the rights of inheritance enjoyed by
Hindu women are exceedingly meagre (see above),
and that although Muslim laws of inheritance are
juster to women, Muslims commonly, at least in the
Punjab, follow Hindu customary law in this respect.
It seems significant of the extent to which this is so
that in the predominantly Muslim Provinces of the
Punjab and of Bengal, the proportion of women
entitled to vote on a property qualification under
the present electoral law is considerably smaller than
in the Hindu Province of Madras.
Education of Girls
The 1 93 1 Census Report shows that, though the actual
number of literates has increased by 24-4 per cent
since 1921, it has been counterbalanced by the
enormous growth of population, so that the proportion
of literates to the population of India as a whole has
increased by only 1 per cent. The number of literates
per 1,000 over the age of five for all India is 156 males
and 29 females. It is noted that “about two-thirds of
the villages in India have no schools.” No doubt
131
THE INDIAN MINOTAUR
economy has retarded the advance, and this makes all
the more startling the contrast between the expenditure
on primary and secondary education respectively, as
shown in the statement that “the average cost per pupil
in all recognized institutions works out at just over
Rs. 23 for 1930, but a separate analysis of the cost
of primary and secondary pupils respectively gave
Rs. 4-5-5 and Rs. 179-4-3 as the cost of each primary
and each secondary male pupil for that year, and
Rs. 10-3-6 and Rs. 467-3-5 respectively as the corre¬
sponding costs of each female pupil. The high cost of
girl pupils is no doubt due in a great degree to their
comparative paucity.”1 It is also disconcerting to find
that, in spite of education being a transferred subject,
the more advanced Indian States — Cochin, Travancore,
Baroda, Coorg — have shot ahead of all British India
except Burma in the proportion of their literates, and
that the three great Presidencies come ninth, tenth,
eleventh on the list. In the order of female literacy
British India shows up no better.2
It seems as true as when the Simon Commission
visited India that
“The public expenditure on girls’ education is still
small compared to that on boys’ education; . . .
the disparity between the amounts spent on the two
is increasing, notwithstanding the fact that, owing
to greater difficulties, girls’ education must necessarily
be more expensive than that of boys; and, as a
1 Census of India, 1931, Vol. I, Part I, p. 335.
2 Ibid., p. 325.
132
APPENDIX
consequence, there is a growing disparity between
the number of educated men and educated
women.
“The importance of the education of girls and
women in India at the present moment cannot be
overrated. It affects vitally the range and efficiency
of all education. The education of the girl is the
education of the mother, and through her of her
children. The middle and high classes of India have
long suffered from the dualism of an educated man¬
hood and an ignorant womanhood — a dualism that
lowers the whole level of the home and domestic life
and has its reaction on personal and national
character. . . .
“We are definitely of opinion that, in the interest
of the advance of Indian education as a whole,
priority should now be given to the claims of girls’
education.”1
And the bearing of all this on the child marriage
question is pointed out by the Census Report as
follows : —
“Besides the difficulty, still felt very strongly in
most provinces, of getting good women teachers, one
of the most serious obstacles to the spread of female
education is the early age of marriage, which causes
girls to be taken from school before they have
reached even the standard of the primary school¬
leaving certificate. . . . We are found in a vicious
1 Interim Report of the Indian Statutory Commission ( Hartog Report) ,
pp. 150, 183.
*33
THE INDIAN MINOTAUR
circle, since the early age of marriage prevents the
growth of female literacy, while the absence of
female literacy seems largely responsible for the
absence of any general change in the early age of
marriage.”1
Importance of Compulsory Registration of Births ,
Deaths , and Marriages
“The treatment of sociological features of the
population of India is much prejudiced by the
absence of any general or compulsory registration of
births, deaths, or marriages ; an absence which
would go far to nullify social legislation such as that
implied in the Sarda Act itself, and to which atten¬
tion was drawn by the Age of Consent Committee.
The difficulties of introducing compulsory registration
are no doubt great, but it is not easy to see how
social legislation can be really effective without it.”2
1 Census of India , 1931, Vol. I, Part I, p. 328.
2 Ibid., Introduction, p. xv.
AUTHORITIES QUOTED
Report of the Age of Consent Committee ( called the Joshi Report ),
Government of India Central Publication Branch,
Calcutta, 1929 — Chap. I, p. 17 and throughout pp. 42,
5<b 5i 52-3
Witnesses before the Joshi Committee : —
Sir P. R. Ray, University College of Science and Technology,
Calcutta (Evidence, Vol. VI, p. 225) — p. 27
Dr. G. J. Campbell, Principal, Lady Hardinge Medical
College, New Delhi (Evidence, Vol. I, p. 443) — p. 28
Dr. N. H. Blair, L.S.A., Darjeeling (Vol. VI, p. 287) — p. 28
Dr. E. A. Douglas, Kinnaird Memorial Hospital, Lucknow
(Vol. IX, p. 53)— p. 29
Dr. Dube, Health Officer of Lucknow (Vol. IX, p, 93) — p. 29
Dr. Sathna, Health Officer of Delhi (Vol. I, p. 439) —
pp. 29-30
Dr. Edith Ghosh, Calcutta (Vol. VI, p. 38) — p. 30
Sister Subbalakshmi, Lady Willingdon Training College
(Vol. IV, p. 1 1 7) — pp. 30-1
Dr. A. C. Scott, Chief Medical Officer of Women’s Medical
Service (Vol. I, p. 25) — pp. 31-2
Mrs. Lilian Starr, Medical Mission, Peshawar (Vol. I,
p. 207)— p. 32
The Hon. Mr. Justice Nanavutty, Judge of the Chief
Court of Oudh at Lucknow (Vol. IX, p. 243) — pp. 32-3,
102, 106
Quazi Zahirul Haq, of Dacca (Main Report, Bengal
Section, p. 68) — p. 33
Khan Bahadur K. A. Siddiqui (Main Report, Bengal
Section, p. 68) — p. 33
Kunbis, examined at Benares (Main Report, United Provinces
Section, p. 85)— pp. 33-4
Mr. J. C. Mazumdar, Deputy Magistrate, Darjeeling
(Evidence, Vol. VI, p. 336) — p. 117
*35
THE INDIAN MINOTAUR
Dr. Muthulakshmi Reddi, late Deputy President of the Madras
Legislative Council, speech before the Legislative
Council, March 27, 1928 — pp. 34-7, 70-1, 129-30
Dr. Suhrawardy, District Medical Officer, Lillooah, Treatise
on Child Welfare — pp. 37-9.
Dr. Arthur Lankester, Tuberculosis in India, Butterworth & Co.,
London, 1920 — pp. 40, 125
League of Nations Report on Health Organisation in India ( 1Q28 ) —
p. 41
Census of India Report, 1931, publ. Delhi, 1933, Vol. I, Part I—
pp. 26, 46, 47, 48, 49, 60-75, J3L 133-4
Provincial Census Reports, 1931, publ. 1932-3: —
Assam Report — p. 48
Madras Report — p. 63
Central Provinces Report — p. 64
Bengal Report — p. 74
Sir James Crerar, Home Member, speech in Legislative Assem¬
bly, September 4, 1929 — p. 43
Secretary of State for India (Sir Samuel Hoare) — pp. 44,
53-4
Mr. Edward Thompson : A Letter from India, Faber & Faber,
1932 — p. 55; Suttee, Allen & Unwin, Ltd., 1928 — pp. 22,
56-7
Lord Amherst (quoted by Edward Thompson) — p. 57
Sir Alexander Muddiman, speech in the Legislative Assembly,
!925 — PP- 57-8
Pandita Ramabai, The High-Caste Hindu Woman, publ. Phila¬
delphia, 1888 — p. 66
Report of the Indian Statutory Commission ( Simon Report ), H.M.S.O.,
London, 1930 — pp. 74, 78, 90-1
136
AUTHORITIES QUOTED
Report of the Indian Franchise Committee , 1932 ( Lothian Report ),
H.M.S.O., London, 1932 — pp. 79, 92
Proposals for Indian Constitutional Reform (The White Paper),
London, 1933 — pp. 80, 92-3
Sir Philip Hartog (in evidence before the Joint Select Com¬
mittee, 1933)— P- 81
His Majesty the King-Emperor, speech to the Round Table
Conference, November 12, 1930 — p. 91
The Round Table Conference , 1930-31 — pp. 91-2
The Prime Minister (Mr. Ramsay MacDonald), instructions
to the Lothian Committee — p. 92
Mr. Gandhi, article in Young India, October 7, 1926 — pp. 10 1-2
Mrs. Frieda Hauswirth (Mrs. Sarangadhar Das), Purdah ,
Kegan Paul, 1932 — pp. 103-4
Mr. Acharaya (in evidence before the Joint Select Committee)
— p. 108
Sir Malcolm Hailey, Governor of the United Provinces —
pp. 1 10, 122
Sir John Megaw, late Director of Medical Services in India —
pp. 26, 1 16
The Health Commissioner for India, 1930 — pp. 74, 12 1-2,
123-5
Major-General W. R. Edwards, Director-General of the
Indian Medical Service — p. 122
Colonel Forster, Director of Public Health for the Punjab (in
evidence before the Linlithgow Commission) — p. 122
Dr. Rukhmabai, Women in Modern India , Bombay, 1929 — p. 126
Health Officer of Calcutta, Report for 1913 — p. 126
Dr. Kathleen Vaughan, Purdah System and its Effect on Mother¬
hood , Heffer & Sons, 1928 — pp. 126-7
137
THE INDIAN MINOTAUR
Dr. Margaret Balfour — pp. 127-8
Report on the Moral and Material Progress of India , 1931, H.M.S.O.,
London, 1932 — p. 128
Report of the Countess of Duffer in’s Fund, 1328 — pp. 128-9
Kumar Garganand Sinha, speech in the Legislative Assembly,
*927— P- * 29
Mr. M„ R. Jayaker, statement before the 41st Indian National
Social Conference, 1928 — p. 130
Interim Report of the Indian Statutory Commission ( Hartog Report ),
H.M.S.O., London, 1929 — pp. 132-3
138
GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD
London: 40 Museum Street, W.C.i
Cape Town: 73 St. George’s Street
Sydney, N.S.W. : Wynyard Square
Toronto: 91 Wellington Street, West
Wellington, N.Z.: 8 Kings Crescent, Lower Hutt
Some Books on India
India— What Now?
A Study of the Realities of Indian Problems
La. Cr. 8 vo. by N. GANGULEE, C.I.E., Ph.D. 7 s.6d. net
££ Devoid of animus, tolerant in statement, and informed in no
little degree by a statesman-like spirit . . . has a clear message.
. . . Mr. Gangulee, among other proposals, wants a ten years
plan of social and economic reconstruction. He also enters a
plea that the next Viceroy should be the Duke of York/’ —
Everyman
Indian Religion and Survival
by C. A. F. RHYS DAVIDS
Author of Gotama the Man, The Milinda Question, Sakya, etc.
Cr. 8 vo. 2 s. 6d. net
The terms <£ transmigration” and ££ rebirth” are much associated
with Indian religious beliefs. The main if obscured feature here
is the man surviving death, identical in changing. The ££how”
and C£ where” are secondary features. This book shows the
nascent Buddhist movement expanding a dim faith into a con¬
viction of vital interest for every man. This waned under the
predominence of monastic ideals, in which the value in “ lives ”
as opportunity in ££ becoming ” or growth was exchanged for
a disvalue in '£ lives ” as prolongers of misery. As a result
of this change, Indian religion has inherited a tendency to
show to man a less in life and destiny rather than a more.
The Indian Theatre
Demy 8 vo. by R. K. YAJNIK 10s. net
££. . . A valuable piece of scholarship.”— -John 0’ London’s
Weekly
Indian File
Cr. 8 vo. by E. P. WHITE 3 s. 6d. net
££ Its absurdities are engaging, and so are the rascally methods
themselves ; the author knows very well what he is talking
about, having served for years in the Indian police.” — Morning
Post
LONDON: GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD
Live Music Archive
Librivox Free Audio
Metropolitan Museum
Cleveland Museum of Art
Internet Arcade
Console Living Room
Books to Borrow
Open Library
TV News
Understanding 9/11